Daily Victorian : A Working Man From Brighouse

Today, our Daily Victorian has the look of a working man about him. Class can be an important aid in dating early photographs : in the 1850s the subjects tended to be the famous, in the 1860s and 1870s it was the rich and then the middle classes, and by the 1880s and 1890s prices had fallen and a studio portrait was within the means of working people. In this case, the studio was that of W Dawson of Brighouse. This particular example refers to studios in Waring Green, which is no more than a mile from Brighouse town centre, but I have also found reference to a studio on Huddersfield Road in Brighouse itself. I know nothing else about Mr Dawson, except that he was a competent Victorian photographer.

Daily Victorian : Under Distinguished Patronage in Sheffield

If you take a man away from his desk for a week and isolate him in the Scottish wilderness with nothing to do other than sample rare malt whisky, he gets to thinking up new projects he can embark on when he returns to the safety of his study. For some reason, I decided to catalogue my collection of Victorian carte de visites and share them in the form of a Daily Victorian. It is a silly and pointless exercise (which is what attracted me to it in the first place), but one you will just have to put up with. Blame the Lagavulin.

We start with an example from my favourite city - Sheffield; and the studio of George Vernon Yates. He had his studios in Davy's Building which, if you are familiar with modern day Sheffield, is now W.H. Smith's. The portrait must date from the early to mid 1890s and features, one supposes, a mother and child. Given that the child must have been born around 1890, there is a good chance that he (she?) was still alive in the late 1970s when I lived in the city. George Yates doesn't explain just who the distinguished patronage he claims was: but, if it counts, when I lived in Sheffield I would visit W.H. Smith's a lot.

Fire In Halifax #2

Fifty years ago I took a series of photographs of a fire in Halifax. It was just a relatively small fire in one of the mills; none of the photographs actually show the fire itself. It was the fire engines, the hose pipes and, in particular, the watching crowds that fascinated me then, and still do: fifty years down the line. The bee-hive hair styles, the bow-legged man, the housewives with babies and children who go out to watch the goings-on: Halifax folk in a world gone by.

Overlooking Halifax

This is a new scan of a negative I must have taken fifty or more years ago. It was taken from the churchyard of St Thomas' Church, Claremount, and shows the bottom part of Halifax back in the days when the buildings were still soot-black and the chimneys that made them so were still smoking.  Halifax Minster is half hidden by a gravestone, but Square Church can be seen on the right of the picture and this helps to date the photograph as the main body of the church was destroyed by fire in 1971.

Talking To Gladys On The Sands

Scanning and retouching old photographs is a little like doing a jig-saw puzzle - it allows you to get up close to detail. Cast a passing glance at a photograph from eighty-odd years ago - you can use this photograph of my mother, Gladys, on the seaside sands as an example - and you might notice the main subject or the approximate location, and then you move on to something else entirely like making a cup of tea or watching Coronation Street. When you are scanning and retouching however, you dedicate time to detail - the shape of the handbag, the activity of the crowds in the background, the pattern of the dress. You sit down and talk to the people and share memories.

Voyage Into West Yorkshire

My brother Roger and I have been discussing book publishing recently. He is about to publish a book he wrote nearly fifty years ago and, for one reason and another, never got published. The book tells the story of a voyage through the canal system of Ireland at a time when "old Ireland" was fast vanishing. He describes the background to the book in a recent post on HIS BLOG.

 By complete coincidence I was attempting to clear out our garage the other day and I came across a pictorial map of the Calder and Hebble Navigation, my brother published back in 1967. If it is time to take a nostalgic return to the canals of Ireland, a revisit to the local canal system fifty years on is even more appropriate. So I have rescanned the map and got rid of as much staining and ageing as I can. Over to you, Roger.

Hashtag Boring

This is the alabaster tomb of James Montagu who was the Bishop of Bath and Wells between 1608 and 1616. The tomb is in Bath Abbey and Jimmy was another of those lifeless figures that stopped me and asked for a selfie. On returning home, I Googled James Montagu in order to discover something of the mildest interest to say about him. There was nothing. Hashtag boring.

Clinging To A Fashionable Youth

I visited the Fashion Museum in Bath last week and, whilst the features exhibits were all very interesting, they tended to concentrate on the clothes being worn by Kings, Queens, Dukes and the like. If I have an interest in fashion, it is as a means of dating photographs - and the photographs I am interested in tend to be about as far removed from the aristocracy as Bath is from Bradford.

I suspect that this photograph dates from the mid 1920s. As is always the case, fashion is the province of the young, and the most distinctive clothing is certainly worn by the young lady on the extreme left of the group.

Her elderly relative - second from the right - clings to the fashion of her Edwardian youth.

Killing Three Birds With A Sea Urchin

My brother Roger sent me an email earlier today complementing me on the new Blog lay-out, and asking me to try and feature more of my old negatives and more old family photographs. I am able to kill two birds with one stone because, by chance, the next strip of negatives awaiting scanning features family members - indeed, none other than my brother himself. The six photographs on the negative strip are featured in the composite image below, and they were all taken during a family holiday to Scotland in the 1960s. 

The featured photograph at the top of this post shows Roger in a rowing boat, on - I think - Loch Levan, and holding a sea urchin shell which he had just pulled from the Loch. I am not entirely sure of the year - my best guess was 1963 - but by featuring the photograph here, there is a good chance that a comment will appear from my brother on the other side of the world, identifying the time precisely. Thus I will be able to date the negatives and kill three birds with one simple negative stone.

A Second Look At Harry Elk

This is Harry Elk. We know that because someone has kindly written his name under his photograph. A date would have been nice, an address would have been better, perhaps even over generous. A quick check of census records results in nobody of that name with a date of birth around the turn of the twentieth century. Whoever he was, Harry was a thoughtful chap who deserves a second look a century later.

The Test Of Time

There is something slightly fake about this Victorian photograph: the quality of the print is a little too good, the line between the foreground and the background is just a little too sharp.  I have examined the print carefully, and as far as I can make out, it is a genuine studio photograph from the 1880s. It is just that she has stood the test of time rather well.