Updates

I have not been updating this blog nearly as often as I should. This will change in the next two or three weeks hopefuly. It is in no way due to lack of material, precisely the opposite as I have hundreds of images still to file let alone scan. A flat move and work, amongst other demands on time have precluded updates.

Meanwhile here are a couple of vintage views to whet the appetite for further postings. Both are images from 1938. One showing Whitby before the tourist invasion of the post war years and the other a model village that is unidentified. If anyone can help with a location I would be grateful.

At the Bottom of the Column, London 1926

Trafalgar Square in August 1926. A rare Autochrome PLate of London in 1926. This has been cropped from a damaged original as Autochromes are fragile and susceptible to fungal damage. This one had extensive fungal damage which is irreversible. This is one of the earliest colour photographs of London and is part of an extensive collection of Autochromes tthat came to light in 2013.

In this image we are looking towards the corner of Northumberland Avenue and the Strand. Two buses are seen in the background. This scene has not changed much in nearly ninety years since it was taken. The lions still stand sentinel at the foot of Nelsons Column and people still gather and use it as a meeting place. 

The Lions are seen in more detail in the lower image on what looks like a bitter winters day in the early 1950s.

 

From Southampton to the four Corners of the World in 1963

Southampton Docks in May 1963. Liners still cover the globe with regular Transatlantic cossings by Cunard, Union Castle liners sailing to South Africa and the Orient Steam Navigation Company to Australia. The latter two lines are seen here. The huge bulk of the 1959 built SS Oriana looms in the foreground with an unidentified Union Castle ship with its lilac coloured hull sits ahead. The funnels of what may be the Queen Elizabeth can be seen in the distance.

Union Castle Line would soldier on until 1977 on the South African run, the Australian route of the Orient Steam Navigation Co. having ceased in 1974. Cunard had stopped regular Transatlantic crossings in the late 1960s with the withdrawal in 1967 of the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth in 1968. The QE2 would still make the crossing, but the regular weekly sailings would be a thing of the past. Air travel making the travel across the globe quicker, although not nearly as comfortable.

All this was a few years away but with the demise of long distance travel by ship purely for travel needs, the ships were converted for cruising as the shipping lines still had to make their ships pay their way (and ships are very expensive things to run). Cruising is now the main reason for travel by sea now, although for those that cannot travel by air, Cunard still does run a liner from Southampton to New York on a semi-regular basis, the Queen Mary 2 is the last liner built for North Atlantic conditions - and I can testify it is really the ONLY way to cross the Atlantic.

Vintage London The Capital in Colour 1910-1960

The past is almost always seen in black and white. It is not always appreciated that colour photography has existed for more than a century. Various factors have conspired together to ensure that the public perception of colour photography is that it is a relatively recent invention, certainly within the last half century or so. 

Over the past twenty years I have been collecting original colour transparencies and my latest book, Vintage London: The Capital in Colour1910-60, draws on that source to illustrate, in mostly unpublished images, London from before World War One through to the end of the 1950s. A London that has vanished into that country where they did things differently – the past.

The most recent images in the book were taken almost 55 years ago and the oldest way beyond living memory.

The 1920s and earlier have been an era that has almost never been captured in colour. A few images are known but a large collection of Autochromes came to the market last year and I was fortunate enough to obtain them. Amongst which were a number of colour images of London taken in 1928, a few of which are included in the book. These show a city that the Victorians would have known.

As far as I am aware this is the first book to illustrate London in the half century from 1910 to 1960 in colour, a city seen through the eyes of photographers who put colour film into their cameras when it was tremendously expensive to do so and who had the foresight to allow us a glimpse into the past that our fathers, grandfathers and in some very rare cases great grandfathers knew.

New York - The Wonder City!

New York on the verge of World War 2. 5th Avenue positively heaves with traffic in this view from 1940.  Taken from the steps of the New York Public Library, the third largest public library in the World behind the Library of Congress  and largest, the British Library.

The bus in the foreground from the Fifth Avenue Coach Company extolls visitors to "See New York - The Wonder City". Three of the companies' vehicles are in view with the next vehicle (possibly a 1931 model, as the company built their own coaches as well as running the routes) on route 2 from Washington Heights to Madison Square. The company went through various sales of parts of the business from 1954 and following a labour and financial troubles the company itself was absorbed into the cities transport system in 1962.

The three banks mentioned on the poster, The Union Dime, the Emigrant Industrial and the Bowery savings banks had various chequered historys. The Union Dime being taken over in the late 1970s, the Bowery is now part of Capital One and the Emigrant Industrial is now the pargest privately owned bank in the USA.

If you look closely at the building in the middle of the picture you can see a branch of the  Gypsy Tea Kettle resturant chain (air-cooled, definitely required in the heat of a New York summer), where you could get your fortune told. This branch opened in 1931. After you had drunk your tea the tea leaves would be read. The chain finally closed around the turn of the millenium.

New York in the Summer of 1940. With just over a year to go before World War 2 this would be the penultimate summer of peace.

Elm Hill Norwich 1957

Elm Hill, Norwich. Partly threatened with demolition in the 1920s it is now one of the more picturesque areas of the City with buildings dating back as far as the early 16th Century. The area dates back much further, possibly to the 1200s, but a fire in 1507 devastated the area and almost nothing survives from before the fire. The Britons Arms, the pink building in the foreground may predate the fire as it stands a little away from other buildings. The Britons Arms Coffee House (open for Morning Coffee, Light Lunches and Afternoon Teas) is still trading. The vehicles and fashions may have changed, but tourists still like their morning coffee and afternoon tea.

At the Circus 1957

Piccadilly Circus, one of the "must have" photo opportunities for tourists in London. Seen here in 1957 with a very well dressed American tourist posing for the camera. Something outwith the shot seems to have grabbed her attention, but not her approbation judging by the severe look on her face! 

The Pavillion, is no longer festooned with advertising as seen here. Piccadilly Circus only has one building covered with adverts now, and these are electronic with light emitting diodes now rather than neon filled glass tubes and it is all rather clinical. In 1957 it was a blaze of lights and one of the sights of London at night when it was a riot of colour.

Some of the adverts here are still household names and some have long gone. 

British Petroleum is still one of the largest oil companies but Ekco - the television and radio manufacturer - has gone and is now merged as part of Phillips Electrical Industries. You can no longer buy Pal Injecto-matic Razors, a product of the American Razor Company, nor can you purchase Miraglo lighting window cleaner which perhaps was not as good as its adverising led one to believe.

Colibri lighters are still manufactured, although the monopol is no longer in the range available today.

Wrigley's is still one of the leading brands of chewing gum, although originally the company made baking powder and chewing gum was offered initially free with each packet. However the gum became more popular than the powder and Wrigley's then concentrated on gum manufacture.

Lemon Hart Rum, now billed as "100% Demerara -The World's Most Flavourful Rum" has been around as a blend since 1804 and the company can trace its origins back even further to 1720. 

Jeypine is still used for hospital disinfecting and is available in the Far East but does not appear to be available in Britain although the Jeyes group still sells Jeyes fluid here.  

At the Pavillion, a cinema which closed in 1986, Eleanor Parker stars in Lizzie, a drama filmed in black and white. The film is shown as a continuous performance, so that if you walked in half way through one showing you could stay and watch the first half after you had watched the second half - confusing when it was a drama or a mystery film!

 

The cinema was gutted after closure and has undergone several metamorphoses since and is now the Trocadero entertainment centre with, ironically a seven screen cinema as part of the complex. The facade of the Trocadero is now bereft of illuminated adverts.

The scene below is of Piccadilly Circus from Regent Street at night around 1961 with the Regent Street Christmas decorations adding to the light show.

Changes at the Bar

Micklegate Bar in York is seen here in 1951. The old southern entrance to the City of York is still today one of the main entrances into the centre of the city although the main road skirts round the old town by the railway station to avoid too much congestion through the narrow arches of the gatehouse.

Although the gate itself survives, some of the buildings seen here do not. The three story Georgian house with the first floor bay windows has gone (despite York's assertion today to be a city that cares for its past, I suspect this building was demolished in the late 1950s or 1960s when heritage was not top of the agenda!) along with the rest of the buildings on the left hand side nearer the camera. The right hand side seems to have fared little better with, again those buildings nearest the camera now gone and the replacements seeming to be faux Georgian replacements.

Now, one can no longer stay at Armatages bed and breakfast, nor indeed park your bike, unlocked propped up by its pedals on the kerb. The Coach and Horses (Tetley brewery, tied house) is no longer welcoming with its brown curtains, possibly once white but now stained with the tar from countless cigarettes. Possibly it never WAS welcoming, but you get the impression that they may have tried long ago. Pubs back then were largely the preserve of the working man, women rarely ventured alone inside. 

There is a garage lurking behind the red and white frontage just beyond the Georgian house with the bay windows. The clock hanging outside is JUST unreadable as to the name of the premises apart from declaring it is a garage.

Among the plethora of enamel signs outside the garage there are two that possibly indicate a newsagents, Players Please and Wills Gold Flake. And on the corner is another Tetley pub, perhaps the Coach and Horses really wasn't all that welcoming after all......

The road sweepers barrow is parked outside the coach and horses but no sign of him - breathalysers are well in the future here and a council bin lorry seems to be parked outside the other pub. It must have been thirsty work!

And presiding over it all is the Micklegate Bar, standing sentinel and strong, for it was built as defence, for the past 800 years or so. 

Inhabited since 1196 it (and the heads of traitors and rebels until 1794) has over the centuries gazed silently over the streets of York.

The ghost of Christmas past.......

Simpsons department store in Piccadily is decorated for Christmas 1965. Simpsons may not be a familiar name to many now - it closed in 1999 and the art deco building is now the flagship store of the Waterstones chain of bookshops. However it was the inspiration for a series on British Television that IS familiar to far more people than Simpsons ever was. 

In the early 1950s, scriptwriter Jeremy Lloyd was employed as an assistant at Simpsons. Twenty or so years later he used his experiences to co-write Are You Being Served?

London at Christmas half a century ago. This is Oxford Street in 1962. Not all night shots on slow film are successful but this one works. You can almost feel the chill in the air as the shops count down the days and their money into the tills. Some of the department stores that fulfilled Christmas wishes for thousands of small and not so small children are still with us but others have gone. 

Whiteley's, Robinson and Cleaver, Derry and Toms, and others have all passed into history. Only memories remain from the cold Christmas trips up to London all those years ago now...

....mostly Westward Ho!

Grand Central Terminal (NOT Station or Depot!) in New York is one of the great indoor spaces in Manhattan. Seen here in 1949 in a time exposure, it is still one of the main transport hubs in the city.

Here seen at an unidentified location, 4451 powers what looks to be the Afternoon Daylight along the Californian coast. 4451 has long been scrapped and 4449 is the only member of the class to be preserved and was retired from service in 1957. Restored in 1974-76 it has been largely operational since then, with its 15 year overhaul scheduled to start in 2013.

An unidentified location is seen here in a Kodachrome transparency. There are clues to the general location in the shot. The car dates it to the late 1930s/early 40s (I am not an expert on American automobiles, 1930s British are my thing!) The lack of ANY other traffic marks it as c1930/40s too (although that is not by any means a certainty as suburban streets such as this would be quiet most of the time). The palms suggest it is hot and the architecture of the houses again suggest a Spanish influence. The lake at the bottom of the road looks to be a reservoir, again suggesting a hot, dry climate. A best guess is California c1941

Although it is hot in the image above, it is not always so in California, the mountains can be treacherous. 

Donner Pass is one such place, named after a group of California bound emigrants who had to overwinter there in 1846 due to their route being blocked by snow, of the 45 survivors of the group (originally 81 strong) some resorted to cannibalism to survive. Bleak is probably the best way to describe the high Sierra Nevadas in the winter, and even as late as 1952 the train the City of San Francisco was slowed in a blizzard and eventually stuck in a snowdrift there for three days.

The Mountains are unforgiving as can be seen in the image of the car below. That is a brave driver!

After our American interlude we will travel back to Europe on the 1938 built Nieuw Amsterdam, of the Holland-America line seen here mid Atlantic in 1950.

1939 -The World comes to New York

The 1939 World's Fair. Held at Flushing Meadows - Corona Park, which sounds idyllic but was actually the cleaned up Corona Ash Dump, New York's dumping ground for coal furnace ash, horse manure and garbage. This was the second biggest World's Fair ever held - only the 1904 St Louis Fair was bigger - and over the two seasons it was open 44 million people passed through the gates.

The British Pavilion is seen in the image above. Visited in June by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth it held exhibits such as the Magna Carta, the first time that it had left Britain. with the outbreak of WW2 it was deemed safer to keep it in the USA and it was stored at Fort Knox until 1947 alongside the Declaration of Independence.

The Fair celebrated the 150th anniversary of George Washington's first inauguration as President of the United States whilst looking forward to the future. In the distance in the image above can be seen the sixty feet high statue of George Washington which stood facing the future in the shape of the two symbols of the fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere.

But this was a fair for the masses and colour photography which had been available since 1907 in the form of Autochrome plates was now easily available with the introduction only four years previously of the iconic Kodachrome slide film. 

This was perhaps the first fair that the public photographed fairly extensively IN COLOUR. The Eastman Kodak exhibit had a background, painted by Salvador Dali, seen above and despite the perception today that colour photography was a product of the 1960s and 70s, colour photography was here to stay, even if prohibitively expensive - and that is why perhaps that it is seen as a recent invention. 

A roll of colour transparency film cost $5 - the equivalent of £50/$81 in today's currency! To put that into some context, the admission price for the Fair was 75 cents!!

Welcome to America - Not everything should be taken at face value......

 

Liberty Enlightening the World has stood sentinel over the approaches to New York Harbour since 1886. Now, her copper sheathing aged green with verdigris, she once shone in the sun, a beacon to millions of immigrants eagerly anticipating a new life in the New World. 

But the image above is not what it seems. No immigrant saw this as his or her first glimpse of America and the statue pictured above now resides in the Brooklyn Museum. Let me explain.....

The statue pictured, a replica of the Statue of Liberty albeit not a small scale one at 9 metres high, stood on top of the Liberty Warehouse at West 64th Street. This building is now converted into flats (condominiums) as, just off Central Park, this is one of the more desirable residential locations in Manhattan.   

The Liberty warehouse is pictured below in 1966.

Off to The States on the Queen Mary - 1952

Our luggage has been delivered to our stateroom on board RMS Queen Mary for the crossing to New York. It is 1952 and there is no restriction on the amount of luggage one can bring on board.

However some took this to excess, to such an extent with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor who traveled with such amounts of luggage that, the story goes, Cunard hinted that perhaps they may wish to travel with less. 

The Duke and Duchess then transferred their allegiance to United States Lines. However there may have been other reasons for their shift in loyalty. The SS United States won the Blue Riband (in 1952 at nearly 40 miles per hour which is FAST for a liner!) and as a sea crossing was the only practicable way of getting across the Atlantic in the early fifties it made sense to travel on the fastest possible ship. Also, living in France, Cherbourg was a more convenient boarding point now that they were no longer welcome in Britain.

I am not sure when (or if) the Luggage story occurred as Edward abdicated in 1936, but was still using Cunard in 1940 - at least to send luggage ahead, as 14 pieces were unloaded from the RMS Britanic in New York with no sign of the Duke on board. 

While we are crossing on the RMS Queen Mary this time, we will possibly use the SS United States on a future crossing.

The next few entries will be images of the USA from the past, starting with a familiar icon - or so it may seem to begin with.  

The front of the Palace......for real, this time!

Round the front of the Palace (not the theatre this time!) and we are in what may be more familiar territory, but four years earlier than the previous post for this is 1953. 

Buckingham Palace is seen in all its smoke begrimed glory - the stone having been cleaned in recent years. This is the official residence of the British monarch, but not that of the Court, which is still officially resident at St James Palace, and a coronation is in the offing. 

George VI having died the previous February, Elizabeth II is now on the throne and her coronation is in a few days, and despite it being June, it will take place in the pouring rain. 

London's streets are bedecked in decorations, but these are surprisingly muted here with only some red banners bearing the letter E to be seen on the right hand side of the image.

The few cars in shot appear to be pre-war and the fashions are muted, Britain was in a period of austerity and the browns, greys and pastel colours of the clothes are typical of the early 1950s. The demographics of the colour palette would not change until the mid to late 1950s when the brighter colours we are familiar with today would start to appear.

At the rear of the Palace in London 1957, not as glamorous as it sounds.........

The rear of the Palace, the Palace Theatre that is. Now, I have NO idea why this particular image was taken, perhaps the three people wandering across Romilly Street are friends of the photographer, but they seem too relaxed to me as normally people posed for the camera. Other than that there is no great focus of interest, just another throwaway shot perhaps at the start or end of a film. 

However, there is a lot to be gleaned from an image even as apparently mundane as this......

Romilly Street had only been named thus since 1937, previously it had been called Church Street, but was renamed due to Sir Samuel Romilly having been born nearby at 18 Frith Street. No, I don't know why they didn't rename Frith Street!

The Palace Theatre, from the front, is one of the more spectacular of London's theatres. It is situated on what was Cambridge Circus, now just a road junction but back in 1957 a roundabout hence the "Circus" sobriquet - much like the more famous Oxford Circus that most people have heard of.

However, from the back, it reveals itself to be just another brick built monolithic edifice of no great arcitectural merit - much like any other theatre. 

We know it is 1957 as Victor Borge, the comedian and pianist,  is appearing in his one man show, fresh from a record breaking run of three years on Broadway.

Looking at the cars, the most prominent is a Standard Ten, which wouldn't park there today as the area is infested with double yellow lines!  The three wheeler looks to be a Heinkel Kabine, in production from 1956-58 so almost brand new here with possibly a Fordson Van behind the Heinkel.

The Coach and Horses pub on the corner is still open for business, although no longer serving Taylor Walker's beer. Taylor Walker, founded in Stepney in 1730 as Salmon and Hare were taken over by Ind Coope in 1959.

Kettners restaurant is still in business, having opened in 1867. Phillip Raphael Ltd advertising is no longer there and is now a barber shop offering £5 hair cuts (which is a bit of a snip in Central London)

"Guinness Is Good For You" is probably the most famous of the Guinness slogans of the period and when the hoarding is as large and prominent as the one at the end of the street, overlooking Cambridge Circus you couldn't ignore it!  

The yellow sign, which is almost unreadable in this image gave me a few problems. Eventually, looking at another shot of Cambridge Circus from 1952 that I have, and even on that slide it is partially obscured, it transpires that it is an advertisement for Dameroids - some type of patent restorative elixir, described on the label as "A Safe and Sure Remedy for General Weakness, Spinal Exhaustion, Neurasthenia, Physical Decay, and Loss of Nerve Power." Obviously so good that it isn't available today!!

The snake oil salesmen were alive and well in London half a century ago!!

The last summer of peace - Knaresborough 1913

In one of the earliest colour images in my collection, Knaresborough in Yorkshire is seen here in an Autochrome glass plate taken in 1913, only six years after colour photography became easily available in 1907. It is typical of Autochromes in rendering colours in pastel shades rather than the vibrant colours we expect today. But Autochromes of towns are rare as most, due to the long exposure times, were of static and colourful subjects.

The image is taken from the ruins of Knaresborough Castle and surprisingly for an image taken a century ago, very little has really changed in what you can see here. The trees now almost obscure the church of St John the Baptist and the railway bridge still carries trains across the River Nidd.

Waterside is the street running below the bridge but what appears to be the gardens of a house to the right of the road now has houses built there. Google Map street view is a wonderful thing and these houses were being constructed in 2008 when the Google camera car tootled along Waterside.

Just under the bridge what may in 1913 have been a house is still there, but new houses have again been constructed in the gardens.

The riverbank has also been extended to the outer edge of the bridge pier and finished in concrete.

Not much has changed here in the past century - and that is not something you can say about many of the images that you will see on this blog!

 

Ose! I thought you said "'oes!"

MacBraynes seem to be having some trouble with letter "o"s at the pier in Tobermory in the early 1960s, possibly a defective batch......

The unidentified steamer seems to be leaving, but then again it could be arriving - its difficult to say!

To be honest the buillding could't be more MacBrayneified if they tried!

The MacBraynes Road services Bedford TK has a load of what looks like bagged gravel. A gent in a kilt views the departing ship which is heading to (or is arriving from) Oban and generally it is a scene of no great significance, but one that occurred numerous times per day throughout the Western Isles and interesting fifty years later simply because of its ordinariness.

The pier today no longer services the ferry, which now runs from Craignure. However, the pier offices still survive today with the upper floor now a seafood cafe, "Cafe Fish", that by all accounts is rather good and the pier is still used by shellfish boats.

There has been no trace found, despite numerous searches over the years of the rumoured Spanish Gallleon wrecked in Tobermory Bay after fleeing from the English in 1588, but it IS a good story nevertheless!

The title of this entry is taken (with due acknowledgment) from the two Ronnies Four Candles sketch, as it seemed entirely appropriate!! Apologies for any readers not from the UK as this will make NO sense whatsoever!!

All the Glories of Empire.........

The Empire Exhibition in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow in 1938 was intended as a showcase of the products of countries in the British Empire. Each country had its own pavilion. 

In what was one of the wettest summers on record the exhibition which ran from May to December almost 12 million visitors attended the exhibition. The Scottish Pavilion is shown above with the lower portion of what was colloquially known as Tait's Tower (after its architect Thomas S Tait), but was officially the Tower of Empire. Intended to be a permanent reminder of the exhibition, it was demolished in July 1939 when war was imminent as it may have provided a distinctive reconnaissance point for enemy planes. 

The image of the Scottish Pavilion was taken on Dufaycolor and is one of two images I obtained a number of years ago. 

Since then I have been fortunate to collect more original images in colour of the exhibition, one of which is shown above. It shows one of the lions at the United Kingdom Pavilion and the vivid colours belie the fact that it was taken nearly seventy five years ago!