1930s Photo Album Scarborough 1931

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!!!

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Scarborough With A Hint Of Bridlington.

We had a weekend away this week, travelling to Bridlington on Friday for two nights. We stayed at a nice enough B&B which was just a bit let down by the shower unit in our room. This was plumbed straight into the water supply. This meant that there were separate hot and cold taps and the room was at the end of a long corridor so no matter where or how you set the taps, the water falling on you alternated every few seconds between freezing cold and scalding hot... Ah well, it was cheap and cheerful - if you don't count the owner's Dad who answered the door at night by saying "I hope you haven't woken our granddaughter up!!!"

I had a camera free day on Friday which is when we took advantage of some bright sunny weather in Bridlington. I had the sketch pad with me but I didn't get round to doing anything with it all weekend - Brid was crowded and seating by the harbour was at a premium and there were hundreds of people trying to eat fish and chips before the somewhat aggressive seagulls got them first. Not everyone succeeded... I didn't fancy spending an hour sketching only for a blob of unmentionable to obscure the page, so I apologetically offer this effort from 1994.

If you want to eat fish and chips then Bridlington is your place. There is probably one fish and chip shop for every seagull. This is actually necessary as the amount of repeat trade they get must be incredible from people who have had (helpful hint on seagull fave method coming) a seagull fly down over their shoulder and land in the tray of fish and chips, snatching a beakful and taking off with the probable spilling of the rest of the tray for other seagulls to fight over.

We found an Italian restaurant called Leoz. Highly recommended! I had the chicken stroganoff and it was delicious.

On Saturday we decided to leave the car and take a bus to Scarborough. Between the two bus stations of Bridlington and Scarborough it is 17.1 miles. This should take around 30 minutes or less, but the bus does not exactly go straight there. The timetable suggested an hour and 25 minutes, but it took quite a bit longer than that in the event. We missed out on the front seats going, but managed to get them coming back. Some of the roads it turned aside onto to reach holiday camps were better than a ride on the roller coaster!

When we reached Scarborough the first building of note that I saw as we walked down from the bus station was this theatre. The original Stephen Joseph Theatre was Britain's first theatre in the round and was built on the first floor of the public library. It moved to a former boys' high school and subsequently in 1988 following the closure of the Odeon Cinema it moved here, opening in 1996.

We walked downhill past the theatre and along a shopping street, cutting off down a side road and finding ourselves near the Grand Hotel. There was a funicular railway going down the cliff to the beach but we opted to take the strenuous route - this being much less strenuous going down than coming up - where we did take the funicular!

So we set off down these steps, admiring the litter and the way that, at the bottom, the handrail stopped being black and instead was seagull-poo coloured to the encrusted state that the end of the railing had corroded altogether and had dropped off.

Scarborough has a South Bay and a North Bay. To someone who lives on the west coast like me, directions on the east coast always seem the wrong way round. Between the two bays is a huge but ruinous 12th century castle high on its hill which was once a hillfort from the Iron Age, a Roman signal point and the home of Norse invaders. A busy spot. In fact all of Scarborough seems a busy spot. There was hardly room on the beach for all the families, couples, and sunbathers to swing a bucket and spade. People lean on each side of a windbreak, at least half of them having underpaid for the privilege.

Amusement arcades line the other side of the road, facing the beach and harbour. They look like Blackpool of yesterday - modern fronts on the ground floor of old buildings. Yet sadly, the amusements are the modern boring collection of cranes and two pence piece pushers with the occasional video shoot-out or racing game. Where did all those pinballs go, which I so loved as a boy and which required skill of reflexes and knowledge of the laws of physics rather than mastery of a remembered past sequence?

The harbour holds a collection of boats from working fishing boats to day trip or half-hour trips round the bays. A marina serves those rich folks who like to boast they "have a boat at the seaside" but rarely can be bothered to move them.

It all makes for a very picturesque scene. In fact multitudes of scenes of water, old buildings, modern amusements, the inevitable fish and chips, and families relaxing.

There are so many architectural styles within a short stretch of road that it is hard to make sense of it. Odd little bits strike you as either pleasing or incongruous. Some manage both at the same time.

On the whole I quite liked it. There were plenty of benches to sit on without having to pay to hire a deck chair - though they were well over-subscribed and finding an empty one was usually the precursor to turning away again as some other foot-weary person or group dived upon the few inches of bare wooden slats.

In the harbour, a single formidable chunk of membrane and tentacles was pulsating and moving slowly round in circles, its progress impeded by the strength of the incoming tide matching its ability to swim against it. It may have been somewhat mollified by the steady and continuing chorus of exclamations and excited shouts of "Oh! Look!" that it caused.

We bought a drink at a cafe and sat on the harbour wall whilst we cooled off and rested our feet. Well... rested our feet anyway. There was no shade on the harbour wall and I was turning a splendid shade of bright red on this, our second day in the sun.

Just after the harbour is this delightful Coastguards' Hut. Do a search and you will find lots of photos of it but finding any textual references will take longer than I cared to spend. Very strange - you'd have thought someone would have thought it worthwhile to say something about it...

Crammed into the smallish space between the harbour and Coast Guard Station is a small funfair with a handful of rides mainly aimed at children.

We retraced our steps until we reached the flight of steps and then we stepped smartly on until we reached the funicular railway - known as the Central Tramway Company. The car was full, I wasn't able to get to the window to take a photo of the other car coming down towards us. There's something about funiculars that always appeals to me. The theory is that the weight of the descending car matches as near as possible the weight of the ascending car and therefore the power needed to operate is not as great as might be required for a single lift.

We had lunch and a quick look round the shops (not my idea...) and then caught the bus back to Bridlington. This time we managed to get the front seat upstairs and it was a fun ride back via all the side roads and holiday parks until we arrived back at Bridlington bus station.

We got back to find a collection of classic cars parked near the harbour, their owners sitting by them, listening to a karaoke set-up. Unfortunately as we got there we were "treated" to a man and woman singing Those Were The Days as a duet. It certainly wasn't how I remembered those days... We decided on an ice cream and the young girl serving laughed out loud when I asked for two cones and two pairs of ear plugs. We sat on the harbour wall for a while until a seagull, sated with a surfeit of fish and chips decided to splatter all over Miss Franny's hand... "Ooh, that's lucky!" I said, a second before the backhander...

Vintage Postcard Time No.1

Today we'll take a look at some old postcards from my collection. These have all come from antique stalls at GB Antiques in Lancaster from a recent visit. The Edwardians were great ones for postcards. There was no email and alternatives were expensive. Postcards were a little cheaper than writing a letter and much cheaper than sending a telegram. Telephones had been invented in the 1870s but only started to become popular after World War One when prices came down and in any case telephones that you could carry in your pocket were a long way off yet.

Cameras too were expensive and few and far between as yet. Telephones in the early 1900s were totally rubbish at taking photos. To take photos of people on the not-very-sensitive film of the day, they had to sit still for anything up to two minutes. Many commercial photographers would have special clamps that they would attach to the back of your head so you couldn't move whilst the photo was taken. If you were of a mischievous bent, you could look one way for half the time and then the other way for the other half whilst your head remained steady in the clamp and the photo would look like you had two pupils in each eye! Try doing that with you iPhone! Hah! So with no telephones and very few cameras, people on holiday bought postcards. Sometimes to send to their friends saying things like "Wish you were here" - mostly a lie, but it was cheaper if you only wrote four words... Sometimes, in fact many times, postcards were bought to be kept by the buyer and stuck into an album as a souvenir of the holiday. Which explains why there are so many early postcards with no writing on them. Like this one of Bridlington.

Move up the coast from Bridlington and you come to Scarborough. This card too has not been used. People would hold postcard parties where postcard albums were passed round and used to re-live the excitement of a holiday. Later you would take your own photos and show friends and family your photos on slide film, with a projector and screen in a darkened room. Oh what fun we had... Now we don't have to do that as there are new ways through technology of boring our friends and even people we don't know, via websites and writing er... blogs... er... let's move on!

Postcard manufacturers realised that they could use more than one view on a single card in an attempt to appeal to the natural stinginess of some holiday makers. This card was sent between two sisters who it seems had each gone on holiday but to different places. The postmark is a little indistinct but it was sent on 17 August in either 1913 or 1915. I suspect 1913 really because the other sister had sailed to the Isle of Man and during wartime that might have been a bit more risky! The card was sent care of the recipient's guest house in Douglas.

The message reads: "Dear Sister," (Perhaps the sender was a bit forgetful and couldn't remember her sister's name?) "We arrived safely after a pleasant journey. Are enjoying ourselves immensely. Hope you are doing the same and I hope you had a pleasant voyage. Give my kindest regards to Janey. Your loving sis, Alice xxxxxxxxxxx" (Alice obviously was worried her sister might also be forgetful and either forget she had a sister or didn't realise that Alice was her sister?)

A postcard of Great Yarmouth with hand colouring and a painted cloudscape. Buildings and other details have been picked out in ink. These tricks of the trade are one of the joys of collecting old postcards for me. Night time shots that are just darkened and painted over photos that were taken in broad daylight, with obvious shadows from the sun, the moon in the wrong direction and cars with headlights shining the wrong way are great fun. This card has not been written on or sent through the post, so another collector's item.

A between the wars postcard showing The Pier and Sands, New Brighton. The water is the River Mersey rather than the sea and it's Liverpool that you can see across on the far bank. A collection of masts or cranes and derricks on the left side are on Liverpool Docks. The pier acts as a means of boarding steamers for a trip across the river or up and down the coast.

The card was sent by a child to her aunt in Deepdale, Preston on 12 August 1935. It reads: "Dear Aunty, We landed quite safely and the weather is lovely and we are having a glorious time. We have been in the water all the time and the lodgings are posh. Yours sincerely, Jean." It was quite common for Lancashire folks to say "landed" meaning simply "arrived". I suspect Jean didn't fly from Preston to New Brighton... Also to many people from industrial towns, guest houses did seem posh - some had a toilet on every landing for Pete's sake! At this time many people would still be using a toilet in a little out-house in the back yard.

Another unused card showing the Saxon water mill at Guy's Cliffe in Warwickshire. Postcards were produced at first by small family-owned studios by a single photographer, but then as they became more and more popular some very large firms came into being, employing photographers to take photographs of a region or even around the entire country. Francis Frith is still a very well known and recognisable brand. Tucks, Salmon, John Hinde Studios, Valentine & Sons, and many others sprang up to fulfil the demand.

A multi-view card by Valentines from Ilkley in Yorkshire sent on 10 September 1954 to a friend in Lytham St Annes in Lancashire. Somehow the card managed to get postmarked twice - once in Leeds and once, the day after, in... er... Ilford. Folks in Ilkley were obviously not quite sure where Lancashire was...? The postmark includes a post office advert that reads: "Save time. Buy 2½d stamps in books, 3'9d a book" (3 shillings and ninepence - 18.75 pence).

The message reads: "Ilkley 10/9/1954. Up north again, this time to Ilkley where my friends from Leeds have moved to. The country is wonderful round here isn't it? How are the ballet activities your way? I've been twice to Festival Ballet this summer. Bye now and best wishes from Pam."

To finish with for this article we'll go down to the far south of the country to Dover. On this card, sent in 1918, there are still masted sailing ships in Dover Harbour, though most of the vessels here sport the funnels of steam power. There is at least one paddle steamer with side paddle wheels to be found. The castle makes for a dramatic horizon towards the right of the photograph.

The card could easily be from a returning soldier, writing home to his mother in Glasgow. It was written in pencil in a very neat hand: "Dear Mother, I have arrived safe at Dover alright, so I am getting on champion. I met Mary at the station, so she was telling me that she doesn't like her new job. Well this is only a P.C. but I'll write a long letter on Sunday. I remain your affectionate J.M. Rae Dov(er)"