A set of articles featuring toys. These mainly if not exclusively feature toys from the 1950s and 1960s so not much in the way of X-Boxes for those who can only play by pushing buttons or twiddling joysticks...
Each article is reached by clicking/tapping the pictures below. A link on each page will bring you back here.
We are back into 1931 for today's article and today the 1930s photo album picked up in 2016 in an antiques warehouse has a different family to show us. The children could be cousins perhaps of little thingy - the usual little girl whose name we have no idea of.
Or they could be neighbours, friends, school pals, who knows? Not me. As always if you recognise anyone here, I'm willing to return this album to the original family if they decide that an ancestor threw it away and they have been pining for a glimpse of their relatives of ninety years ago. Here's Mum, looking none too sure at sitting on the swing. She's smiling, but the little girl behind has just yanked at the ropes and Mum's right hand has made a grab for support! A shame that there isn't a view from further away, showing what the ropes are fastened to - I'm not sure whether two trees were growing handily next to each other or whether the family have erected a specially built frame...
Whichever it is, it is sturdy enough to hold a bit of weight. Can you move from the back, Elspeth? We can't get a good swing going...
Dad's turn to sit on the swing but he is not allowed to have a proper go either as the two younger girls clamour for pride of place. Daddy is dressed for play in his three-piece suit with tie and waistcoat. You want to see how he dresses when he's really poshed up!
Wait! But what's this? No sooner are the girls called into the house for their dinner than Daddy pushes off and is soon swinging wildly and hoping that the draught caused by his swinging will keep his pipe glowing nicely! Uh oh... I can hear Mummy's voice asking the kids where their Daddy is... He should be thickening the gravy. He's going to cop it now!
Another set of photos from the 1930s photograph album from an unknown family.
This time we are in Scarborough and once again the emphasis is on snaps of the family rather than scenic views. In a town like Scarborough there would be plenty of postcard views to buy and they were cheaper than taking your own photos and paying for film and developing and printing! As I have said before, I don't know these people but in my mind this is mother and daughter. Mother on the right is in turn the grandmother of the little girl that appears most often throughout the album.
Which makes this pair the daughter and father/grandfather. He likes a bit of fun does Grandad, as we shall see in a moment...
Grandma and Grandad. Grandma is wearing the cloche hat with the strange slits around the brim that in bright sunshine allow splodges of sunlight to shine on her face through the hat. Luckily the day is a little overcast today so we can see her face.
This visit to Scarborough must have involved an overnight stay. It could have been a weekend or even a full week's stay for we have had a change of clothes from the previous photograph. Grandma has taken off her hat and we can all marvel and wonder at the strange object to the left. A pet sloth...? A monkey with its head tucked in for a nap? A stoat perhaps that has eaten the cloche hat? And I haven't really worked out the nature of Mum's hat yet... Is it another cloche? At times it looks like a cloth headband with a curtain around the back and at other times it looks like her own hair escaping from the sides.
With Grandma and Grandad in Scarborough Castle. Grandad has remembered his old skills herding mountain goats in Afghanistan and even Grandma is keeping a sharp eye out for the goats which inexplicably are entirely missing from this picture...
By gum, it's a windy day - just look at that bit of castle leaning over... Mum, Grandma and little - drat I wonder what her name is - are standing at the entrance to the tower and leaning on the wooden rails for support in the wind.
That's better, Grandad, move a bit closer! Grandma has put her hat back on as the wind has dropped but there's no sign of that pesky monkey. Well, he'll turn up once he gets hungry enough no doubt...
We've moved further into the castle. That cloche hat is rapidly on and off like a yo-yo. It might have been the height of fashion in 1931, but without it Grandma is revealed as being quite attractive. Little - what's her name again? - is looking upwards. Has she spotted the monkey somewhere up on the tower?
In the exasperated yet amused words of children throughout the ages: "Ohhhh.... Grand-dad!!!
Today we are having a look at the earliest photos from the 1930s photo album I bought from an antiques store. Today it doesn't really matter that I don't know the family who put the album together, because they don't appear in any of today's selection. I'll make up for it in the next article...
These photos were all taken in two villages along the River Wharfe in Yorkshire. I haven't been to either of these villages myself, that I can remember, so it's as much a journey of discover for me as it is for any of my readers. Anyway we have yet to arrive, for we are simply "near Kettlewell"
In any other year I would have been in the car and off to have a look at these places, no doubt taking a few of my own photos. However, as we currently sit in the Coronavirus lockdown, this isn't possible. I'll look at it as a challenge for happier times. I'll be looking to identify the original location and if it has changed beyond all recognition to take some photographs to illustrate what has happened over the last 90 years.
This is something that hit me only after I had been through the album myself. There are no babies in the family. The youngest child would be around six or seven in 1930 so that even if they were still alive they would be in the second half of their nineties today. The likelihood is that no one shown in the albums still survives. If by any chance one or more of the family's children still survive, I would love to meet them and go through the album with them. Wouldn't that be something?
Now that we are actually in the village itself, I'd be expecting to still be able to view this scene - though perhaps on a slightly more level plane. It is likely this was taken on a Kodak Box Brownie camera. Many cameras of the day had no viewfinder. You simply pointed the camera at the required scene and squinted along the top of it, or the side of it. Plenty of scope for tilting it a little bit. Lots of scope for looking in the wrong direction and missing your intended subject altogether! Anyway, for added interest, just let me point out that this is Kettlewell's Village Hall and it was the location for the WI in the movie Calendar Girls.
St Mary's church Kettlewell is mostly a rebuild of 1882-1885, although the west tower (the tower - there is only the one...) is a survivor of a previous church and dates from 1820. Pevsner wasn't all that interested in it I'm afraid though this approach up the lane to a lych gate looks attractive enough.
And here is the River Wharfe itself. One of Yorkshire's major rivers it flows for 65 miles from its source in Langstrothdale near Beckermonds to its end as it flows into the mighty River Ouse, which at 129 miles - all within a single county - stops the Wharfe from getting above itself. I haven't yet found out when the current bridge at Kettlewell was built. It takes the B6160 road over the river. I doubt it is the same one that the Abbot of Fountains Abbey paid over two shillings to repair in the mid 1400s.
A few miles south of Kettlewell the B6160 touches the River Wharfe again at Burnsall. The album contains just two photographs of Burnsall, so I've tagged them onto the end of this article. The bridge dates from 1609 but what we see today is mostly, or perhaps entirely, of an 1884 restoration after flooding damaged the original.
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.
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!
