GRANDAD'S PHOTOGRAPHS 1919

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?