Sepia Saturday 119 : Orange Creams Of The World Unite

Coming from a family of mechanics and engineers I have always had a kind of ambivalent attitude towards work. Work was something you did wearing a pair of overalls, something that dripped oil over the back of your hands and required you to walk around with a ruler in your top pocket. By such definitions I have never been a worker, for me, oil was something you cooked your chips in and a ruler was something that lived in a pencil case. For a short time I was a bus conductor and wore a uniform and that was about as close to real work as I ever managed to get. For the rest of the time I wore a suit and shuffled papers about on a desk which, although it meets the old Marxist description of "workers by hand and by brain", never seemed to produce anything.

So for Sepia Saturday this week - where the theme is WORK - I turn to my father, Albert (most of you will recognise him by now, seated just left of centre), who was a worker by any definition of the term. Here he sits in front of one of the machines he will have helped to build and install, and what a wonderful machine it is : a real machine. It has levers and dials, buttons and switches and looks set to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile into orbit. However, the only thing it would launch into orbit was an Hazelnut Cracknell or a Strawberry Delight, for my father worked for the sweet and chocolate manufacturer, John Mackintosh, makers of Quality Street.

The photograph perfectly illustrates a pride in work and workmanship. Here was a body of men (ah, in those distant and unenlightened days, the men built the machines and the women operated them) who had collectively created something; something which they no doubt thought would last for a hundred years. It didn't : the firm is gone, the factory is gone and the machine will be long gone. But the photograph has survived, so I am going to reach over and select an Orange Cream from the tin on my desk and pay homage to the world of work and workers.

To see the work of other Sepia Saturday contributors, visit the Sepia Saturday Blog and follow the links.

Pulp Fiction : Sense And Sensibility

I bought a book yesterday. Now that might not seem like a big deal to you, but it was to me. It is the first time in almost four months that I have actually bought a book, and by book I mean one of those thick things made out of paper and glossy cardboard. When I invested in a Kindle last December I decided to give it a decent trial period, imagining that it would take some time to get used to the transition from parchment to pixel. However, I was surprised how easy the change was, Kindles are sturdy little things that can be tucked in almost any available pocket. When you fell asleep at night they always remember the page you were reading and these days the range of titles you could buy is enough to keep any bookworm burrowing. Whilst some of the digital offerings were annoyingly expensive, Amazon did a daily deal where you could graze the genres for just 99p a bite. You could download first chapters free and carry a library around with the ease of an elephant. All praise the mighty Kindle!

I recall once reading that the majority of vegetarians who had fallen off the wagon, did so when they had unexpectedly come upon the smell of a bacon sandwich. And yesterday was a bacon sandwich moment for me - whilst undergoing the misery of "shopping" with the GLW, I passed a bookshop. I have been in bookshops since the Kindle Epiphany, but simply to browse, to research downloading possibilities. I had found the experience somewhat grubby and unsatisfying, a bit like walking down those back streets in Amsterdam and looking at the ladies sat in the windows. Something happened yesterday, something different. I fell off the wagon, I bought a book. In many ways it is an annoying thing; it wont fit comfortably in my jacket pocket, it gets dog-eared and beer-stained and, I suspect, it will not last for ever. But as I left the shop with my guilty purchase suitably wrapped in a brown paper bag, my heart danced with joy. All praise the mighty book!

Oh, I know what you are all going to say - there is a place in this rich and complex life we lead for both Kindles and, for the want of a better phrase, what we could call, quite accurately, pulp fiction. I am sure it is true and you won't be seeing my Kindle for sale on EBay any time soon. Kindles make good sense; they are easy, practical and good for the environment. But books, real books, pulp fiction, they have sensibility and sensuality and they make the hell of shopping just a little more bearable.

Treading The Green that Fowler Trod

The new outdoor crown green bowling season starts next week. Following a winter of rigorous practice on Huddersfield's magnificent indoor bowling facility, I can reveal that Denis and I are just as cack-handed as we ever were and our one hope of matching Isobel and Sue during the up-coming season is in the development of a bowling App for our iPhones. (Note to App developers : surely the creation of something which takes into account the gradient of the crown, the weight of the bias, the lie of the jack and calculates a suggested road cannot be beyond an appliance that can pinpoint a gnat sneezing in the Sahara Desert).

To mark our return to the outdoor green at Cowcliffe - ah the resonant clack of bowl and jack, the happy click of glass against glass - I thought I would post one of the postcards from the collection of my great Uncle, Fowler Beanland. This photograph must have been taken 100 years ago but you can still see the same stances, the same calculating looks that measure the respective distance between jack and bowls, the same purposeful stride down the green after delivering your winning bowl, on countless crown greens across the north of England.

Devonshire Park in Keighley still exists but as far as I can tell there isn't a bowling green there any more. I must take a trip there soon and investigate matters. It would be rather fine to tread the green that Fowler trod.

Nice Morning For The Revolution

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness : it was the summer of 1968. In Paris, the Sorbonne was under attack by riot police, in cities all over the world people marched against the war in Vietnam, and on Blackstone Edge we held a commemorative meeting. I remember how this curious gathering came about; I was at a Young Socialist meeting in Halifax and I suddenly said "what we need is an anniversary". The reference books were consulted and Blackstone Edge which is high on the moors between Halifax and Manchester was chosen. In 1846 the great Chartist leader, Ernest Jones, led an army of workers out of the mills of Lancashire and onto the high moors to meet up with their comrades from West Yorkshire. The Chartists were demanding votes for ordinary working people, the abolition of the Corn Laws and a host of other political reforms. At the gathering high on Blackstone Edge, Jones, who had the reputation of a fine poet and orator, addressed the meeting. He later wrote a song to commemorate the gathering:

O'er plains and cities far away
All lorn and lost the morning lay
When sank the sun at break of day
In smoke of mill and factory

But waved the wind on Blackstone Height
A standard of the broad sunlight
And sung that morn with trumpet might
A sounding song of liberty!

When a small band of Halifax socialists clambered back onto the moors at Blackstone Edge in 1968, the wind didn't wave nor was the sunlight broad. In fact the moors were smothered in a thick mist. But it takes more than a damp morning to postpone the revolution, so we took our banners and gathered at a spot close to the track of the old Roman road. That legendary local socialist, Tim Enright, read the speech that Ernest Jones had made 122 years before. Then we sang The Internationale and as we did so the mist miraculously lifted. And all of a sudden we noticed an elderly couple walking down the Roman road with their dog. It must have been strange for them, to be walking high on the moors, to hear singing, the mist to lift, and there before them is this strange group of left wing radicals gathered around a banner. In the best traditions of these parts, they didn't bat an eyelid. They merely looked up, nodded and said "nice morning for it"

One Pin, Two Views 6 : Some Final Thoughts

Well I have thoroughly enjoyed myself this last week with the experiment Jennyfreckles and I have been carrying out. Our decision to independently visit the village of Thornton and photograph whatever took our eye has resulted in some fine images. It has also demonstrated that cameras are rather clever objects : when you point them at a subject, they not only take a photograph looking forwards, but also capture a reflection of our own personality and frame of reference. Looking back on the photographs Jenny has featured in the series, it is clear to see that she is a master of shape, colour and composition. Looking back at my own ..... well you can draw your own conclusions, but the fine old Yorkshire expression "maungy bugger" comes to mind.

I am finishing with a brace-and-a-half of images which I suppose sum up my Thornton experience. The first one features a broken old gas lamp on a mill waiting to be demolished. Down in the bottom of the valley there are a host of such buildings. mostly empty and disused. patiently waiting with what remains of their Yorkshire dignity to be converted into aspirational apartments.

When I spotted that second image of a closed and derelict post office I couldn't help thinking of the stonemason who carved the date above the windows in the belief that here was a building that would last the torrents of time. But it is perhaps the third image that encapsulates Thornton for me : the steep hills, the cobbled streets, the wonderful houses.

Finally, can I thank everyone who has followed this little experiment of ours, your comments have been an integral part of the process in the very best traditions of Blogging. And can I particularly thank Jennyfreckles - the Salt to my pepper, the Wise to my Morecambe. If Jenny agrees, I would like to suggest that we repeat the experiment next year and indeed make this an annual experiment which, along with the buildings of Thornton,  will last the torrents of time.

These posts are only half of the story. Visit Jenyyfreckles' excellent SALT AND LIGHT Blog to see how she has concluded the experiment.

Sepia Saturday 118 : Going Out (To Thornton?)

The theme for Sepia Saturday 118 is "Going Out" and I have chosen this photograph of my grandparents (Kate and Albert Beanland) to illustrate it. They are certainly going out : Albert with his best silver watch chain, Kate with an upturned soup plate on her head. And what that rather curious hand gesture Kate is making is, we shall never know (which is perhaps a good thing)! I suspect the photograph was taken in the immediate post-war years - Albert died in 1948 at the age of 73.

So where was the photograph taken? I suppose it could have been the seaside, but times were hard in those immediate post-war years and pleasures often had to be found nearer home. People would go out for a day, to a park or local beauty spot. The reverse of the photograph provides no firm evidence, but it does give an address (Yarwood Grove, Bradford) where my grandmother lived. And if you look at a local map and imagined where they might have been going out to, what is that village a couple of miles north-west of where they lived? None other than Thornton, the very same Thornton that Jennyfreckles and I have been blogging about all week. So my Sepia contributions might just be part of my "One Pin, Two Views" series. We will never know, but I like to think it is.

Get yourself out and see what everyone else is doing this Sepia Saturday by visiting the Sepia Saturday Blog and following those sepia links.

One Pin, Two Views 5 : Painting The Layers Of Life

There is a particular type of house you often find in West Yorkshire towns and villages : stone terraces houses with a bit of a swagger. They are often set a little above street level so you can sit in your bay-windowed parlour and look down on the rest of the world. There will be a little wooden porch so you can shelter from the ever-present rain whilst your shake your umbrella off. And there will be little adornments, little pieces of unnecessary decoration which sets the overlooker aside from the mill-worker, the Council clerk from the railway porter.

And these little wooden banisters and traceries provide endless decorative opportunities for house painters. How many generations of Thornton house-painters have clung to their ladders whilst painting every twirl and curve in olive green are oak tan? Layer upon layer of paint matching the layer upon layer of generations that have inhabited these well proportioned rooms.

The houses on Wensley Bank, Thornton, have a fine prospect across the valley. You could look out of those windows and feel at peace with the world. And in the light of those windows you could get out your paint chart and plan what colour to paint the woodwork, what shade to mark the layer of your life.

This is the fifth part of the exploration of Thornton, West Yorkshire by Jennyfreckles and myself. We visited Thornton independently and used our cameras to record our own interpretation of the village. You can see how Jennyfreckles has approached the task by taking a look at her SALT AND LIGHT Blog.

There will be a break from this series tomorrow to make way for my Sepia Saturday post, but the final part of One Pin, Two Views will be published on Sunday.

One Pin, Two Views 4 : The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore

For those of you familiar with my blog there will be a question you will have been asking yourself ever since I started this short series of Thornton photographs : "when is he going to get to the pub?" Well, I think I have done quite well, because here I am, at Day 4 and I have only just arrived at the pub. And the sad thing is that it is closed. There are indeed still a good few pubs open in the village (I felt it incumbent on me to visit three or four in the interests of research) but I always feel that the closure of just one public house diminishes the sum total of happiness, conviviality and joy in the world.

If you climb up out of the centre of the village, up West Lane, you will need a stout constitution and by the time you reach the top of the hill you will deserve a bottle of stout - or two. For previous generations of walkers, the Sun Inn at the junction of West Lane and the somewhat spooky Wicken Lane has provided refreshments for the weary traveler. But alas, the inn sign no longer swings in the north-easterly breeze, the hand-pumps no longer dispense Waller' Nourishing Stout or Hammonds Ales, and the brittle click of bone dominoes no longer sends cats seeking the shelter of cellars.

The Sun Inn, Thornton rose every day for over one hundred years with the certainty of celestial clockwork. It made it into the twenty-first century: just. And then it closed and now it slowly fades into antiquity. I belong to a Flickr Group called The Dead Pubs Society and we share photos of pubs that were and are no more. I will add the Sun to our collection - and shed a tear as I do so.

This is the fourth part of the exploration of Thornton, West Yorkshire by Jennyfreckles and myself. We visited Thornton independently and used our cameras to record our own interpretation of the village. You can see how Jennyfreckles has approached the task by taking a look at her SALT AND LIGHT Blog.

One Pin, Two Views 3 : A Bin, A Bath, And Time

Thornton is quintessentially Yorkshire: stone terraces climbing steep hillsides, mills and moors, bitter beer and dry humour. And Yorkshire folk hate nothing more than wasting brass (spending money extravagantly). We build dry stone walls up in these parts: why waste money on mortar when stones can hold themselves up. And if you have an inconvenient hole in your wall, just find yourself an old dustbin, slit its sides and hammer it out.

And if your wife demands a new bath, there is no need to waste the old one. The sheep need to drink and the bright blue fibre-glass will blend into the grass and stone landscape eventually, after a century or two. But time passes quickly up on these hill-tops; it was only yesterday that the young Bronte children trod these paths. I remember hearing the story of an old farmer who went down into the village to collect his pension for the first time. He arrived at the Post Office at 8.00 am only to be told that it didn't open for another hour. "It's all right mate", he said "it doesn't take me long to wait an hour"

This is the third part of the exploration of Thornton, West Yorkshire by Jennyfreckles and myself. We visited Thornton independently and used our cameras to record our own interpretation of the village. You can see how Jennyfreckles has approached the task by taking a look at her SALT AND LIGHT Blog.

One Pin, Two Views 2 : Stone and Smoke

Much of the village of Thornton is constructed along the side of a valley. When the settlement reaches the top of the valley-side it contents itself with sending thread-like filaments out into the green of the rain-rich fields. These stone terraces thrust out into the countryside and then seem to almost lose interest.

The second photograph is merely an enlargement of part of the first photograph. Look at the chimney-pots. These houses received no shelter from the valley, their little rooms were under constant attack by a wind that was being funneled down from the Arctic tundra. But they were built near seams of coal which delivered heat to the rooms and smoke to the atmosphere.

Stone and smoke and mucky washing hanging out on a line. 

Thornton.

This is the second part of a short series in which two photographers - myself and Jennyfreckles - examine the same village from different perspectives. To see Jenny's second photograph in the series go over to her blog : SALT AND LIGHT.

One Pin, Two Views 1 : Where To Start

At some point last year, Jennyfreckles of the blog Salt and Light and I started to discuss, via comments on each others' blogs, how different photographers approach the same location. As we live only a few miles away from each other we often find that we are taking photographs of places the other has featured on their blog and we became intrigued by the different approach two people might take to the same set of stones, hills, mills and moors. And so we came up with a game (or an exercise, or a project) to investigate this phonomenon. We would stick a pin in a local map until we came up with a village that neither of us was familiar with and then each of us, independently, would visit the village and put together a small portfolio of photographs. This is not a competition (if you are familiar with Jennyfreckles'  work you will know that I could never win such a competition) but a way of assessing how much of what a photographer sees is, in fact, a reflection of themselves. We have decided to publish a selection of our photographs of the West Yorkshire village of Thornton (the place where the pin came to rest) over the next week. I have no idea what images Jenny is going to come up with, but I will be very intrigued to find out.

Where does one start? I suppose one could start with the famous bit of Thornton which is the house where the Bronte sisters were born before the family moved a few miles up the road to Haworth. Or one could feature the beautifully curvaceous Thornton railway viaduct which crosses the valley like an ancient relic: sans trains, sans rails, sans everything. But what really struck me about the village of Thornton, which is only two or three miles from the centre of busy metropolitan Bradford, was the way the little streets of old stone terraced houses threaded up the side of the valley, linking nothing with nowhere, pasture with moorland. I can't remember the name of this little street, but if you Photoshopped out the two cars and drained the shot of colour, it could have been taken at any point during the twentieth century.

This experiment of ours is about our own personal interaction between a place and ourselves, and this, I suppose, makes it an exercise in psychogeography. So this was my first interaction, the first point where I felt compelled to press the shutter and capture Thornton through my eyes. Which makes it a very good place to start.

NOW YOU HAVE READ THIS, GO ON OVER TO SALT AND LIGHT TO SEE THORNTON THROUGH JENNYFRECKLES' EYES.