One of my favourite Christmas presents was a 500-piece jigsaw. The picture was a colourful scene of a Devon town in the mid-1960s. There are various vehicles from that era in the foreground and centre: a red e-type Jaguar, a 2-tone blue Ford consul, a green Austin A35, a white and blue Hillman Minx, a black Morris 1100. I had hours of fun putting it together. The focus and concentration required was quite therapeutic. I was given it by family and so they were happy to leave me to work on it, occasionally coming to check on my progress. It was obvious where some pieces went, for example the vibrant red had to be part of the e-type. Other pieces were more challenging. The road had shadows but other than that was a uniform light grey and there was a lot of it. The only way I was able to figure out where each piece went was by their shape. It was so absorbing. After putting the boys to bed, I would return to the puzzle and keep at it until 1 o’clock in the morning, by which time I had broken the back of it. The following morning, I resumed my task and felt a huge sense of achievement when I put final piece in place. I took a photo and then after admiring my handiwork for about 20 minutes, I broke it up and put it back in its box, ready to be put together again at some point in the future.
I have taken on a slightly larger project. Dad has passed me all his old photos and slides. Some of the earliest ones must date back to the 1880s. There are two large albums and two boxes of slides. The project is to scan the photos into a digital format, repair the scratches and creases using a clone tool in my photography software and then add tags to each image, effectively recording all the handwritten notes written on the back of the photos.
I have taken the slides to a local photography shop that specialises in scanning and repairing old slides, but I have chosen to scan the photographs with my own printer/scanner. I have set the resolution to 1,200 dpi, which is the maximum my printer works at and not far off the 1,400 dpi resolution that the photography shop will be using for the slides. Most of the early photos are black and white, with colour becoming more prevalent for images from the 1960s and onwards.
There are some handwritten notes to aid identification. I also have a family tree going back about five or six generations. There are some names which recur from generation to generation. My great, great grandparents were William and Frances. These names occur several times. There appears to be some family links to Australia. My great grandmother returned to England from Australia with two sone in the 1880s. Much later in the late 1950s my other grandmother travelled to Australia on the Arcadia to visit family in Sydney. There are a couple of photos of her entering a fancy dress competition on board as a glamourous granny.
Beyond the family links, I am enjoying the clothes and vehicles featured in the different ages. There are photos of very smart people wearing 3-piece suits for the men and elegant dresses for the women on what appear to be day trips to the beach. One distant great aunt appears riding on a four-wheel penny farthing, next to her husband, identified only as ‘the minister’. He has short hair, a long white beard, and is wearing a three-piece suit as he is about to climb onto his penny farthing. Even as late as the 1960s, there are photos of people doing menial tasks such as mowing the lawn in suits and ties. There is one photo of me on holiday in Devon wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a bow tie on steps next to the beach.
But it’s the cars from the 1960s and 1970s that I really love. There is one picture of me and two of my sisters, Jane and Linda, in August 1963. We are in the lower foreground of the photo, slightly out of focus, but posing and smiling at the camera. Behind us in almost perfect focus is our neighbour’s Ford Classic Capri. It is a beautiful car. The photo is black and white, but I remember the car. It was a stunning vivid red. I think if I had been taking the photo, I would have framed the composition in exactly the same way. Many years later my first car was a Ford Consul Classic, the four-door version of the Classic Capri. It was a wreck, but I loved it.
My own early transport features in the photos. In August 1963 I am seen in a black and white photo riding my tricycle. It had a boot/trunk a brake and a bell. I remember being able to take corners at speed whilst balancing the tricycle on two wheels and holding it there with just the slightest adjustment of the handlebars. A couple of years later I appear in a colour photoshoot following a trip to the local bike shop. I had graduated to two wheels: a gold and green Elswick Hopper with white grips on the handlebars and a white saddlebag. Jane had a slightly bigger blue bike; Linda had a slightly smaller blue and pink bike and Doug had a pedal car in the style of an American jeep.
We all tried to squeeze into the pedal car. We were pleased with our own bikes, but there was something cool and attractive about the jeep. Linda memorably took her blue and pink bike to the top of Caesar Road one Sunday afternoon to enjoy the sensation of speed as she descended the hill. Unfortunately, she hadn’t mastered the braking system. She picked up speed uncontrollably and could be heard screaming and calling for help as she approached the house. All down the hill men leapt out of their front gardens, dropping their gardening implements, attempting to reach Linda as she sped past them. I think Dad was the only one who made it and even he struggled to help her bring the bike under control before she reached the T junction with Fishponds Road. We have no photos of the event, but I do have a little cine reel in my head which is still quite vivid.
Once we got over the jeopardy of what might have been, the story became a treasured part of our shared family history, which we loved to retell. With each retelling, the hill got higher, the bike got faster, the number of men leaping from their gardens increased and Linda’s screams got louder.
These photos were all taken at 33 Caesar Road, Kenilworth. Over the following 10 years we moved from the Midlands to the South Coast and the bikes came with us. Eventually my Elswick Hopper was modified, losing first the chainguard and then the mudguards. I think it would have kept going forever, but I outgrew it. I am looking through the photos for my next bicycle, a Carlton International, but I can’t find one yet. It was a full-size racing bike, with drop handlebars and 5-gears. It was predominantly white, with green, fluorescent mudguards. It was a lovely bike and I used it regularly on my 8-mile school commute, even in rain when I would wear a yellow cape and sou’wester hat.
The archiving project is destined to take a few months as it needs to fit in around other activities. Scanning the photos one by one is slow, and then adding ‘tags’ to each image is quite painstaking. Not all the photos need repair, but some of the older ones need some cloning to remove dust spots and other imperfections caused by the passage of time. Some favourite photos have been handled quite a bit and so the cloning tool is needed to remove creases and scratches. Then there are the stories that emerge and the discussions that need to take place. There are finite boundaries to the immediate project, but I can imagine future activities of tracking down long-lost relatives in Australia. That is not for me, but if I complete this exercise, it will give others the opportunity to investigate further, if they wish to.
Stephen's Wildlife 