Several years ago I bought an old 1930s photo album from an antiques shop with a view to scanning the photos and using them on the blog. In the ensuing years with around 100 photographs waiting to be scanned, cleaned of scratches, dust marks, tears and scuffs, it got shelved in favour of me scanning my way through my own collection of negatives.
Anyway with all the excitement of 2020 I've dug it out and have today finally scanned the last of the 98 photos, breathing a short sigh of relief that the other 27 pages of the album had not been put to use!
Each page that had been used contained multiple photographs, though luckily for me most were arranged side by side as the above right hand page and not in a format like the left hand page where each photo required jiggling the album around on the scanner bed.
I have no idea who these people are. That they lived in the North West of England I am in no doubt, as the album was bought in Lancaster and the places depicted - which in most cases are labelled - range from the Lake District to Lancashire seaside towns, the Yorkshire Dales and coast, North Wales and in a rash and singular photograph: Shropshire. Perhaps the air so far south made the family a bit giddy... Anyway with absolutely no bias being shown at all, I'll start in Blackpool!
Out of all the people depicted on these photos there are a few who regularly crop up and who must have been the proud owners of the camera. By the time of these photographs, Eastman Kodak Box Brownie cameras had made photography a popular, if rather expensive, hobby. Even when I got my mitts on a Kodak Instamatic in 1966 my parents would admonish me at the start of a summer week's holiday: "Now don't go mad with that camera - save some film for Christmas...!"
So on this particular set of photos, although I recognise it as Blackpool - I lived there for 40 years and am not that far away now - we won't be seeing any photos of the Tower, piers, or Pleasure Beach. Just the family on the beach somewhere to the south of the Foxhall and Manchester pubs. And yes, that is a large chimney sticking up in the background, probably the one at Rigby Road gasworks.
A couple of the photos feature buckets and spades - the staple activity at the time was digging sandcastles, or holes to Australia or scale models of Kilimanjaro which was oft just a by-product of the hole to Australia. Buckets and spades were made of metal at the time. If you jammed a spade into your bare toes by accident you would most definitely know about it as your Mum washed the blood and sand off with salty sea water and your Dad uttered something like "Well let that be a lesson to you to be more careful!"
If you were lucky, the reward for a decent stab at Australia was an ice cream. There was a choice of vanilla or plain if the ice cream seller forgot the vanilla... Ice cream stalls on the beach didn't have refrigeration so ice cream tended to be frozen solid at the start of the day and contained solid lumps of ice until several hours had passed.
The men of the family. Or friends, or whatever. None of your slovenly t-shirts here - they were something that US soldiers would wear under their shirts ten years later during WW2 to stop the unwashed shirts from smelling. Here we are all dressed in suits with a waistcoat and tie and hankerchief showing from the top pocket. Trousers have turn-ups to catch any fluff or coins and keys they might inadvertently drop.
Likewise the ladies are looking their best. Cloche hats, suits with skirts, silk stockings, furs and pearls - the perfect gear for a day at the beach. This album was put together by a fairly well-to-do family, you will have noted by now. Indeed, they owned a car, which we shall see once or twice during future dips into the album. However, it certainly would not have held all the people we have seen so far. We can place these photos a bit more precisely now as there is a (mock) windmill on the Promenade behind them to the left. This used to be just south of Manchester Square where Lytham Road joins the Promenade. It would later be moved southwards to stand opposite Waterloo Road.
Time to head back to the digs where Mrs Scott is no doubt hard at work making tea! The fact that this was more than a day trip makes me think that some of the large group of people may simply have been staying at the same guest house and the children and/or adults had made pals. So we will leave these good people to have their meal and then either take in a show or simply go out out again to walk along the Promenade and "swank". I'll leave you to guess which of them will be back in the next set of photos from the 1930s!
If by any chance you recognise any of these people, I am willing to return the album to the family. Often photo albums are thrown away by one generation, leaving the next to wish they still had them. My email address is featured on each page of this blog in the side panel. Perhaps best to wait for a couple more articles to make sure the people you have recognised do actually turn up again!
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