Sometimes life can take you in
peculiar directions. Last weekend I was having an exchange of views online, and
the words moved, as they sometimes do, into the world of “compare and contrast” and we were
discussing how our parents and grandparents used to dress when compared to the
modern phenomenon of (shudder!) going
outside to the shops (or whatever)
in their flippin’ pyjamas.
So far, so “old man’s prejudices”
but it reminded me of a photograph that I was sure I’d seen as we went through
my mother’s photographs in the period after her death, which was of a group of
Edwardian looking ladies standing on the seafront on a summer’s day in hats and
furs.
Long story trimmed, I turned the
house upside-down and never found that particular snapshot, got very fretful
and obsessive about “another thing lost”, and even rang my sister to ask if
she’d got it amongst the bits and bobs she had salvaged, before deciding that
this might be a misplaced memory of some other photograph that I saw at around
the same time, but which wasn’t a “family snapshot”.
What I did find, however, were two exercise books that, a long
time ago, had belonged to my grandfather when he was a teenager. This was in
1919 when he was a young fellow from that lucky generation who were just ever
so slightly too young for the carnage of
the first world war.
In 1919 he was about fifteen and
had an interest in “Amateur Photography” which was what he painted onto the
cover of one of the books which, as we’ll see, was one of the few moments of
“useful labelling” that he took the time to do.
Turning the pages, with the
photos carefully mounted into the cuts in the pages, I was transported to a
lost world of his other interests, most of which seemed to be industrial or
mechanical, and he did seem to have developed an interest in motorcycles at a
very early age, and I do (vaguely) remember
family tales of him taking two days to drive to Cornwall in a motorbike and
sidecar (in those “pre-motorway” days) shortly after his marriage
One thing that interested me was
the what would is nowadays called a “selfie” that he took, presumably with his
Box Brownie in the darkness of whatever room he had when he was growing up. It
just goes to show, I suppose, that there’s nothing new under the sun, and, for
as long as we have had photography, the photographers have been turning the
cameras on themselves.
One of the problems I have had
with my grandfather’s photographs is that there are very few labels on any of
them. For years I have had his boxes of old slides (mostly taken during the
1950s and 1960s) stashed away and every
time I decide to have a look at them, I am stymied by the fact that many of his
holiday pictures are indexed simply by the name of the cruise ship they were on
and nothing else in a kind of “I
know where they were taken, why should anyone else need to know?” way. There
are boxes and boxes of pictures of interesting looking places and I have very
few clues as to where any of them are, apart from the odd sign saying “Aeroport
Nice” or wherever.
This is also true of the several
books of pictures of family and friends, none of which I know, and who smile
their long-dead smiles out at me in a series of enigmatic mysteries.
To be fair, when it comes to
labelling, I tend to do this myself, which means that I have folder after
folder of digital pictures marked “California 2012” or whatever, which wouldn’t
be of much use to anyone who came to look through them in the unlikely event
of me ever managing to become interesting enough for someone to care about doing
so.
But those old exercise books
contain their own mysteries from nearly a century ago, and I’d love to have
asked him what was going on in several of the photographs, but, of course, I
never even knew that these exercise books existed until long after he had died,
because he never mentioned them.
Well, not to me, at least.
So I find myself wondering why a
ship’s boiler might be sitting on a beach looking for all the world as if it
has washed up onto the shore, which is, of course, most unlikely, even after
the torrid maritimes of the First World War.
The boiler itself (with
presumably a schoolfriend standing next to it for “scale”) looks very like the ones in my books about the
“Titanic” so I’m pretty sure that it’s a steamship boiler, and, after posting
it online, it was suggested that there used to be ship-breakers on the Mersey
back then, so I suppose that it had something to do with that, as the only
other “coastal” place that he might have had easy access to would, I presume,
have been the Isle of Man, which he visited several times judging by the
plethora of pictures of the “TT” races that he took.
There are a lot of pictures of
old motorbikes, of course, but other mechanical things drew his attention, as
they do me whenever there’s something “interesting” to photograph and I clamber
all around it like David Bailey photographing a supermodel in order to create
several hundred parts of the dullest photographic record ever known to humanity.
Mind you a schoolboy - presumably a friend of his - sitting on a tank, or a cannon and a mine aren't necessarily things that we might see every day...
The odd thing is, of course, that
the thing that interests us is how different the world was then, but what seems
“old” to us was just commonplace and everyday then, and so those pictures of
railway trains and aeroplanes were just ordinary things then that the passage of
time has managed to make more fascinating.
One other mystery is the presence
of several snapshots of what looks like a house collapse drawing a crowd. What
they did for entertainment back in those “pre-television” times, eh? It looks
as if they were building some kind of gasometer around (???) a couple of houses and a steel girder fell onto one
of the houses.
Well, maybe. I didn’t realise
that the two photos were connected at first, so I thought that the “boxy” shape
sticking out of the roof might be part of an early aircraft because he had
“form” with photographing disasters if the box of slides marked “Stockport Air
Crash 1967” is anything to go by.
Anyway, I’m now pretty convinced
that it’s the end of a box steel girder, but I still find myself wondering why
you would build a gasometer before demolishing the houses, why it drew such a
crowd, and whether there are any local news stories about it, wherever it was.
One photograph was labelled as
being of “standing traffic” during a rail strike in 1919, which I thought was a
tanker wagon, but it turned out, courtesy of the knowledgeable folk on the
internet, to be another boiler, which led them to ask me whether my grandfather
had some kind of obsession with boilers, and it was only then that the gears in
my mind clicked into place and I realised that he did, indeed, spend his entire
working life as a plumber.
This particular boiler was made,
it turned out, by a rather famous boilermakers in Dukinfield, “Daniel Adamson
& Co” which, because of the fickle nature of the universe, is pretty close
to where I earn my own paltry crusts nowadays.
Funny how the world turns, isn’t
it?
