1930s Photo Album Kettlewell and Burnsall

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.

Return to Found Photos Index

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.

Return to Found Photos Index

1930s Photo Album Includes Blackpool From 1931

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!

Return to Found Photos Index

Return to Blackpool Promenade and Beach Index

Blackpool's Centenary of Trams Cavalcade, 1985

1985 was the centenary year of the trams and saw several visiting restored trams. On 29 September 1985 a parade or cavalcade of these trams alongside several of Blackpool's own trams - themselves mostly over 50 years old - travelled down the Promenade tracks.

I had hoped to be on the walkway over the Promenade roadway, but I was a bit late in getting there to secure my place! I settled for a spot on the side of the track, where I could be on the front row, so to speak.

This is the sole survivor of Blackpool's original fleet, designed to pick up power from a conduit slot set between the rails. As this no longer existed, the tram was running on batteries.

The vast Dreadnought tram was Blackpool's early workhorse. They first appeared with the conduit system and carried on after conversion to pole and overhead line operation, moving thousands of people daily until at last they were replaced by the Balloon double-decked trams in the 1930s. Tramcar 59 is the sole survivor.

A Blackpool Standard tram. Originally built 1923-29 with open ends to both lower and upper decks, the Standards were mainly used on the Layton and Marton routes, the inland route that had taken early visitors on a circular route around the town. The last two such trams to be built were fitted at last with windscreens and after a decade whose drivers endured wind, rain and blown sand, they were retro-fitted to the remaining Standards. Two cars, 158 and 159 were fitted with external decorative lighting for use during the Illuminations. Car 158 went to the Crich museum for spare parts, but car 159 still exists without its illuminations and offers rides at the East Anglia Transport Museum at Carlton Colville, near Lowestoft.

Princess Alice, an open topped Balloon variant was due to be scrapped due to the corroded state of its upper deck, when someone suggested taking the top off altogether. The result was an elegant and popular addition to Blackpool's fleet. There had previously been open-topped versions of the Balloon tramcar, but they had all been enclosed during World War II.

Dating from 1928, this luxury tramcar with upholstered seating and enclosed body ran on the Fleetwood to Blackpool North Station route. It ran until 1957 upon which it was used for five years as an engineering car before being donated to the national tramway museum at Crich in Derbyshire.

A slightly strange story behind No.10, one of two final tramcars ordered for the Hill of Howth tramway in Dublin, Ireland. These were slighly longer than the company's existing eight cars and tended to derail often due to the lack of cross springs between the bogies. Built in 1902, because of the tendency to derail they were used mainly for peak period running only and when the rest of the fleet was repainted to a new blue and yellow livery they kept their teak colour. Car 10 had to be re-guaged from 5 feet 3 inches to the UK standard of 4 feet 8 and a half inches to run in Blackpool.

Likewise an Edinburgh tramcar. Built in 1948 at Edinburgh's Shrubhill works it joined the Edinburgh fleet just as the city was starting to wind down its tramway operations. It saw just eight years of service and was preserved only due to the tram of first choice suffering a bad accident and the tram of second choice being repainted in "last tram" colours. It spent several years on display in Edinburgh before appearing on the Blackpool tracks throughout 1985.

Manchester single-decked tramcar 765 was built in 1914 for use on routes that had to pass under low bridges. To cater for smokers who would normally be directed to an upper saloon, the tram had an enclosed middle saloon and open areas at either end where smokers could indulge their habit. It is the only surviving such tram car and has operated for many years at the Heaton Park Tramway, Manchester. Incidentally, it has lost its original bogies and runs on re-guaged bogies from our old friend, the Hill of Howth tramway.

One of a rare clique of post-war tramcars, Glasgow tramcar 1297 was one of a class of trams known as Cunarders and was built in 1948. Seating 70 passengers on two decks, it came to the end of its service in 1962, was sent to Crich the following year and went straight into passenger carrying service there without the need for any large scale refurbishment. It remains on display at Crich, but is no longer operational.

Another late build tram is the Sheffield tramcar 513, which dates from 1950, having been built by a Wakefield firm which would much later be acquired by Bombadier, the firm whose Flexity 2 trams have run as Blackpool's main fleet since 2012. Carrying 62 passengers, the Sheffield tram saw just 8 years of operation before Sheffield ditched trams for 35 years before opening the South Yorkshire Supertram in 1995. This tram returned to Blackpool long term in 2001 and with the temporary closure of the tramway to refurbish for the new Flexity 2 trams it transferred to the East Anglia Transport Museum where it still operates.

Blackpool's own Balloon double-decked tram. This type of tram ran continuously in Blackpool from 1934 until 2011. This was one of the final cars to be delivered, dating from 1935. Subsequent to withdrawal from service, this tramcar was acquired privately and has been stored in agreement with the Fleetwood Heritage Leisure Trust.

Blackpool's own post-war tramcar was the Coronation class, built in the year of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1952. In keeping with other post-war tramcars they had plush comfortable seating and were fitted with VAMBAC equipment under the trolley tower. This allowed for smoother acceleration than the more common 8-position power controllers, though they drew more power from the system and frequently blew circuit breakers on sections of track which meant queues of stationary trams would result. They also had problems with roof and window leaks, and water would also get into the VAMBAC equipment above the roof, leading to most of the Coronation fleet being converted to more standard controllers. Luckily Blackpool retains a small number of the Coronation tram as part of the Heritage fleet.

A steam tram brings up the rear, puffing smoke out from its funnel. These were designed to pull a double-decked trailer, seating 26 people on both upper and lower decks, 52 in all. They had a relatively short working life between the days of horse-drawn trams and electric trams. Laws were passed that all moving parts had to be covered by a metal skirt in order for them to be used on public roads to avoid anyone being dragged into wheels or workings in case of collision with a pedestrian. This appears to be an example from the Rochdale, Bury and Manchester area. This was the second largest steam tramway in the country at the time. The steam tramway used a narrow guage of 3 feet 6 inches. It closed in stages as both Rochdale and Bury electrified and the Heywood Corporation Steam Tramway came into being, running trams from Rochdale to Heap Bridge from April 1905. It lasted a mere 6 months, closing on 20 September 1905.

Return to Blackpool Trams and Buses Index

A Bird Sanctuary Linked to Arthurian Legend

Back in 1983 I was writing my, to date, one and only novel - a fantasy about King Arthur, but set within a version of England inhabited by a fair number of creatures of legend and superstition. It was based on the original legends as far as I could research them and I ignored most characters that only made an appearance from the 12th century onwards when Geoffrey of Monmouth suddenly conjured Lancelot into being and turned the sixth century Arthur and his followers into eleventh and twelfth century knights in shining metal armour.

Early historical and contemporary records of Arthur are very few and then tend to be no more than single-sentence entries such as in the Annals of Wales. Early legends are full of references to fairy folk. So I included them (with some glee) into the book. Almost every region of England has local legends claiming sites as Arthurian castles, forts, battle sites, Camelot, you name it. So I also set out to include quite a number of both famous sites such as Tintagel and lesser known sites such as this one.

This is Martin Mere near Burscough in West Lancashire. Before it was drained it was apparently once the largest body of fresh water to be found in England. Even today this marshland is an impressive sight. Now operated as a bird sanctuary and wildfowl centre on a cold March day in 1983 birds were few and far between and, if they had any sense, were sunning themselves in warmer climes... No matter. It wasn't particularly the birds that I had come to see.

It was the fact that this mere is one contender for the site of the legendary Lake Linnius, sometime home to the Lady of the Lake of Arthurian legend. It's not the only place that claims to be Linnius and certainly not the only lake to claim the priestess-cum-sorceress-cum-neophyte-cum-enchantress, Nimue or Vivienne or whatever, look let's just say I had a varied choice ok? Anyway, the atmosphere on that gloomy day well suited the legend.

The book, King And King To Be, was published in 2012 and is available as an eBook in Amazon's Kindle Store - see link in the side column.

Return to Legends, Lore and Superstition Index

Blackpool Steam and Transport Day, 1992

It was possibly a full weekend event, but my records show that we visited Blackpool Airport on Sunday 13 September 1992 for that year's Steam and Transport Spectacular.

Whatever the truth (and someone might remember better than I) we found the airport field full of old cars, lorries, traction engines and steam rollers and the odd one or two steam fairground organs. I had the pleasure of driving one of these old Bentleys for a while as a young lad, working in a photographic studio in Oldham. It sucked in petrol at an alarming rate...

Even more personal to me was this Mark III Ford Zephyr 4 as I had one of these cars myself way back in the 1970s. This car pre-dates the number plate year identifier which places it as dating from before February 1962, but mine was a C reg, so it was a 1965 model. A lovely car with full bench seat in the front and gear lever on the steering column.

The apparent favourite of most people who remember the Zephyr/Zodiac models was the Mark II of which this is the Zodiac and a convertible open-top as a bonus.

Blackpool Airport at this time was not as fully developed as it was to become and there was plenty of land available for events like these. Health and safety wasn't quite as stringent as modern times either. It has gotten ridiculous now due to the willingness of people to sue for damages for any incidents which are really their own fault and the bewildering way judges are reluctant to say "Well you shouldn't have been so stupid...". Here I am standing behind the barriers (a length of red and white striped tape) at the end of the runway to take this photo of a Pitts Special stunt biplane taking off to give a show.

One of the strips of tarmac was occupied by steam traction engines. The forerunners of petrol or diesel-fuelled machinery tractors they were, even within my memory, once a regular sight working as road rollers although by the 1950s the much lighter diesel-powered tractors had taken over most duties on farmland. The showmen's engines worked generators to power fairground rides and lighting.

In addition to the full-sized machines was a collection of working scale models. Mostly, if not all, built from scratch they must have represented hours of painstaking work by enthusiasts.

The showmen's engines were usually covered with a roof which not only protected the driver but the generator that was mounted in front and above of the boiler. Water and electricity not generally being the safest of combinations, this was a safety feature rather than an acknowledgement that farmers were a hardier breed, not minding the weather!

A feature of any steam engine is smoke. Generally of the thick, black and choking sort. Showmen's engines, usually parked next to the ride they were powering had tall chimneys that carried the smoke upwards rather than release it just over people's heads. These chimneys were detached and stored horizontally on the roof when the engines were not in use at the fairground.

I used to take a small cassette recorder with me to some of these events to capture "atmosphere", the sound of engines and background noise and announcements from Tannoy systems etc. I still have a couple of tapes somewhere with music from these wonderful old fairground and street organs. I ought to look them out and see if they will still play and if so get them digitised onto the computer. One day...

A row of classic lorries. So many of them were open-sided. Just a flat deck on which goods were stacked, I remember being bowled over once in my teens by a coalman's lorry, being hit on the back of the shoulder by a bag of coal that was sticking out a bit too far and caught me as I was walking over a narrow hump-back bridge where the pavement had petered out. I suppose the lorry should have waited until I was across - I was facing away from it and already more than halfway along the bridge before the wagon came up behind me. I was lucky not to end up with my legs under the lorry's back wheel. He didn't stop of course...

Bringing this article to a close is this photo of a beautiful luxury Pullman motor coach. Complete with curtains, tables and shaded lamps, this 1934 coach would have been the pinnacle of coach travel of its time.

Return to the Blackpool Attractions Index Page.

Snow Falls in Blackpool and District

Monday 31 January 1983. We awake to the sight of snow falling in Blackpool.

Grabbing a camera, I set off to walk up the Promenade. Usually snow in Blackpool means a few tiny flakes floating for half an hour. It is very rare to see snow actually start to settle let alone cover the ground like this.

Having lived here in Blackpool for almost half a century, this is the only time I can remember snow covering the sand on the beach! Although on saying that, we only lived close to the seafront for five years, whilst my parents had a hotel on Trafalgar Road.

The White Church in St Annes looks a little whiter amidst the snow. It doesn't take long for traffic to start turning the snow into dirty coloured slush on the roads! And sadly, that is it. Why I didn't take more photographs that day I really can't remember. Either I had to be somewhere else or I was too skint to buy film (photography was an expensive hobby back then!) or I was afflicted by a fierce desire to be back in the warmth of home... I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, these were the only record of the day that I was to make.

Return to Blackpool Promenade and Beach Index Page