The season for finding old pictures?

[PeterW]

Hi all,

This seems to be the season for finding old photographs. Just before Christmas I was digging around among old magazines in a charity shop and came across an old D&P (Develop and Print) paper wallet with about 20 old photos in it, some badly faded but mostly scannable. I don't know if they all relate to one family. The pencilled name on the wallet is Westcott, and on the back of one photo is pencilled "Could be Mr. Westcott's Nanny".

In age they seem to range from the 1920s backwards but only one has any dating information on the back. In pencil it has "Stromness 1908". Stromness is on the largest island in the Orkneys, to the north of the Scottish mainland. Another is of the British Empire Pageant at Wembley in 1924.

The box of old mags was marked '20p each' (about 30c), and that's all I was charged for the wallet and contents!!

I've scanned in the wallet and four of the photos but haven't made any attempt (yet!) to see how they will restore with PS.

Peter


The paper wallet which contained the photos


Stromness 1908


Loading the car on board ship. The car is obviously packed for touring, but the official on the dock doesn't look very British, so maybe this was return journey from the Continent?


British Empire Pageant at Wembley 1924


This is the one that has pencilled on the back 'Could be Mr. Wescott's Nanny

[Randy]

I like to see pictures of how simple things used to be before all this technology arrived. I just read a book about the automobile and how it effected peoples lives. The automobile was thought of as a noisy, smokey, annoying toy for the idle rich, and the word was that it would never replace a stout horse and sturdy wagon.

[herron]

Randy:
Your comment made me recall something my late grandfather, who was born in 1899, told me as the reason he did not want to get on a commercial flight to come visit us (this would have been about 1957-58, when I was 10)..."If God had meant me to fly, he would have given me wings." He never did get on an airplane, and he lived to be 92.

I'm not sure things were really all that much simpler "way back when" -- but it often seems like it, and maybe that's why we look back so fondly on images from earlier times.

Thanks for sharing these pictures, Peter.

[PeterW]

Randy,
You wrote:

I like to see pictures of how simple things used to be before all this technology arrived.

So do I, I find them fascinating, but everything inevitably changes. Even nostalgia's not what it used to be!

More simple? Maybe, but I wouldn't want to go back in time. My parents were both Victorians, and Victoria's reign ended only 28 years before I was born - equivalent to 1974 to my four year old grandson Luke. And things changed very little until the start of World War I in 1914, equivalent in 1928 to 1992 today, and to me that's the recent past.

I can speak only for the UK, but I had several Victorian aunts and uncles some of whom, when I was boy, lived in the same Victorian houses with furniture and conveniences that hadn't changed much in 50 years despite, or maybe because of, World War I. They weren't particularly short of money. Maybe they wanted to continue living back in their 'good old days'. They were always talking about them.

Life may have been simpler than today, but even not counting the depression of the 1930s, which I remember vividly, it was a lot harder graft, especially for women in the home.

I was fortunate. My family was resonably well off, and my mother, and her mother, were great believers in technology - such as it was then. We had a big radiogram early in the 1930s with a long outdoor aerial in the back garden and a huge cut-out switch to disconnect it from the set at the first sign of a thunderstorm. As soon as they became available, my mother bought an electric washing machine with power wringer, a Frigidaire and a Hoover - all American btw.

We had central heating in the late 1930s. Oh, what a boon that was. No more carting coal around the house in a heavy scuttle, no more dead fires to rake out and clean every cold winter morning and no more shivering till the newly-lit fire got going - then you toasted one side and froze the other! No more annual visits from the chimney sweep with the never ending cleaning up of soot that got everywhere.

This was at a time when some of my aunts were still boiling clothes in a stone floored back scullery in a boiler under which they had to light a fire, rinsing by hand and then mangling in the open in the back yard using a huge wooden-roller mangle. They cleaned everywhere on their hands and knees with a dust pan and brush, and then had to dust all the pictures, ornaments and knick-knacks in the room. They hung mats and carpets out on the washing line regularly to beat the dust out of them with big bamboo beaters. The front doorstep was whitened very morning with a 'whitening block', and the brass knocker and house number were cleaned and polished.

One of them even had a gas-lit house because she 'didn't trust that new-fangled electricity'. In many country districts they didn't even have gas, they lit oil lamps and candles to see by when it was dark. If they had recorded music at all it was via a wind-up acoustic gramophone and shellac records. They didn't have main drainage, and often only one cold water tap in the house, over the stone kitchen sink.

Only two houses in our road in the 1930s had telephones (ours was one). People walked miles, or sometimes cycled, to work. If a working class man had work, a 54 hour working week was common - six days at nine hours a day - and, relatively, for the average working family wages bought far fewer even simple luxuries than today, even though basic food was cheap. When the unions fought for, and won, a five and a half day working week, either Saturday afternoon off for factory and office workers or, for shop workers, an 'early closing day' during the week, people wondered what to do in their spare time!

Childhood diseases - mumps, measels, whooping cough and so on, were rife, and faimlies dreaded an outbreak of tuberculosis, for which there was then no known cure. If families were not on a doctor's 'panel' (you paid a few pennies a week whether you were ill or sick) they often couldn't afford a doctor and treated themselves and their children with medicines from the local chemist's shop or with 'old wives' remedies, some effective, some useless, some worse than the disease. Antibiotics? What were they?

With a non-mobile working population, extended familes including grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all living near each other were usual, and in the cities, such families were seldom strangers to childhood deaths. Lead was in almost all paint, even that on children's toys, asbestos was in ironing boards, cloth pads for handling hot kettles, rooves of sheds and outhouses and even ceiling boards indoors. Arsenic weed killers. concentrated hydrochloric acid, or 'Spirits of Salts, for cleaning lavatories, packets of caustic soda for cleaning drains and other dangerous chemicals were freely available and were stored in a kitchen cupboard.

Many parents were relieved if their children lived to eight or nine after which their immune systems and common sense had developed enough for them to be considered relatively 'safe'.

A few years ago I had a cataract operation on an eye. The surgeon used laser surgery and the whole thing lasted about 20 minutes with a local anasthetic. When I was a boy a cataract operation would have meant at least four days in hospital and only a 75% chance of keeping your sight. Having an apendectomy was a really major operation, almost equivalent to heart surgery today.

We may view old photos and look at the past through rose tinted glasses, but for my part you can keep the old simple way of life.

I still like looking at old photographs, though, and I try to picture the lives people in them led. Like anyone today, they had their sad times and they had their happy times, their triumphs and their disasters, and they didn't miss what they didn't know about. Electronics and advanced medical technology was all in the future.

Not a criticism of anyone's sentiments here, but I'm glad I'm still alive with all the technology of today.

Dammit, I wouldn't even have known of your existence , Randy, nor anyone else on this board, had we all been born many years ago, and played with the new marvel of the Kodak box camera. And believe me, that would have been my loss.

Sorry to carry on so. I'll shut up now.

Peter

[vintageslrs]

Very Nice Peter!

Thanks for reminding us that the "good old days" weren't necessarily so...but our mind tends to purge the not so good stuff and keep the good stuff.
And every once in a while we need that pointed out.


Thanks
Bob

[John Parry]

Can't send children up the chimney to sweep it any more Peter - but as someone pointed out there's no actual law against lowering them down from the top on a rope!

Regards - John

[Randy]

Don't get me wrong Peter, I like technology, I'd just like to be able to switch it off now and then. I guess that's why me and Freda like to go camping, to get away from things and get primative. Coal? We can't get away from it. We live a couple blocks from the Pittsburgh & Conneaut Dock Company here in this port of Lake Erie. There are piles of coal here as big as a mountain. The loading of coal to ships creates a dust cloud that shifts toward our house every day. I have to scrub my siding with a broom and soapy water just to get the blackness off my house. My house was built in 1867 and still has gas pipes in the wall for gas lights and my windows are 62 inches from top to bottom. There used to be a Widow's Walk up on the roof, but it came off when the new roof was installed. I'll have to take some pictures of the lake boats and dock company for you all.

[luke]

Peter what a superb disseration and a great picture find. I must admit, nostalgia for me only goes back to the fifties to which my rose tinteds lend a happy glow. I think there is a distinction to be made between nostalgia and an interest in history. I love these pictures because they are mysterious and clearly from a distant age and they make one wonder who these people were and what became of "Mr. Wescott". I noted in an earlier post that you are a Jeff Beck fan as I am. (As well as Hank Marvin, Clapton et al) In some ways my musical tastes are from a particular era and associated with the ups and downs of the romantic side of my life. These emotions are distinct from my love of old things (especially mechanical precision devices). So while I can sigh pleasantly at the contemplation of loves lost, fine works of mechanical art produce intense interest and fascination as do the pictures you found.
So thanks for posting them.

Luke