1930s Photo Album Hodder Valley 1931

We are once again dipping into the 1930s photograph album that I bought in an antiques shop in Lancaster in 2016.

This time the family are having a day trip to the Hodder Valley, at some point in 1931. The Hodder is a tributary of the River Ribble which it joins close to the village of Whalley. With the exception of one, the photographs are labelled "Higher Hodder" which places them at a point due west of the town of Clitheroe.

Once again the family are in their Sunday best clothes. The two women to either side feature in more photos from the album than anyone else so I suspect one of them was the owner of the album and camera. My money would be on the lady on the right. She is holding a rug; very sensible as to sit on rough ground would be risky to clean skirts and possibly disastrous for silk stockings! The lady in the centre is holding the little girl's coat and her own fur, possibly a mink. Please don't judge old photos from a present day viewpoint, it's a different world now. As an example do we now look back on how we used to use spray cans of deoderant willy-nilly when they released all those greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and if so do we hate ourselves for it? No. We never gave it a thought then and neither did people in the 1930s worry about where their clothes came from, because in those days there were no man-made fabrics. At some point your own great-grandchildren will be talking about how evil you were if you ever drove a diesel or petrol engined car...

The lady on the right here has a hat that causes some problems for a photographer. Any hat apart from a skull cap will cause shadows on the face that our eyes deal with far better than a camera can hope to, but just to compound things her hat has small holes around the brim which cast splodges of light onto her face and forehead when the sun shines through them. And she wears this hat a lot... Whilst this is a fairly affluent family, people in the past were not as troubled as today by having to wonder what dress to wear as they were unlikely to have several wardrobes full of choice. The two ladies here appear to be standing on some sort of platform or bridge. It can't be a bridge across the River Hodder as that is a fairly significant waterway. One of life's many mysteries...

Eeh, look at our... actually I have no idea what the little girl's name is. Or anyone else for that matter. We are very lucky indeed that the family member who placed these photos lovingly into the album even bothered to label the year and place. But it is frustrating isn't it not to have any further information? This photo gave me particular pause to ponder. (Ooh - nice alliteration!) It was the only enlargement in the album. By enlargement I mean that the photo was 5 inches by 3 inches (12.5 x 7.5cm) rather than the usual small enprint size of 3 inches by 2 (7.5 x 5cm). It was also unique in being pure black and white rather than sepia toned. The enprint actually was in the album a few pages further along. To digitise these photographs I had to scan them, then reduce them all to pure black and white, alter both brightness and contrast, clean up lots and lots of marks, scratches, dirt and in some cases torn edges. In a very few cases the borders were just too far gone to save and I cropped the photos and added a new white border. It will probably be obvious where I have done this when you see them. Then I applied sepia toning once again. In the end I decided to treat this photo as I did all the other enprints, so it is sepia toned.

The family car. It is a Morris Oxford 10/4, a model that was produced between 1926-1928. In 1930 the number of cars in the UK topped one million for the first time. For comparison it was around 38 million as at the end of June 2020, a fall of almost one percent from the previous year due to people declaring their cars as SORN - off the road - during the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown and also adding the fact that during the pandemic fewer people were buying new cars to have them sit on the driveway going nowhere. I had to post this photo up on a FaceBook group and am grateful to both the members of the Enthusiasts of British Motor Vehicles Built Before 1985 for their assistance in identifying the car (in about ten seconds flat!) and also to my mate John Ellson, who not only knew what it was but posted me a modern photo of a preserved example of the car.

A scenic view from Lower Hodder Bridge according to the caption, but it looked more like the view from Higher Hodder bridge when I checked Google. Someone will know and might be moved to comment perhaps. Lower Hodder bridge takes the B6243 across the river and is a stone's throw from the ruins of an older bridge known as Cromwell's Bridge commemorating the fact that Oliver Cromwell marched an army across it on their way to the Battle of Preston in 1648. My own photo of it can be found in an article on this blog.

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