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Why a new blog?
And what am I going to write about here?
Well, since I have been sorting through the hundreds of old prints and negatives ‘inherited’ from my parents and grandparents, I have found that there are many that don’t fall into the category - ‘my early days of childhood’, but are still interesting, or maybe interesting to future generations.
You see, I have no idea what my great grandparents thought, what they did and enjoyed. All I have are old faded, and some not so faded, photographs of my very smartly dressed Uncles. I also have sepia, and black & white pictures of my Aunts, ‘suffering in their stays’, as Dylan Thomas wrote in Under Milkwood.
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| "Suffered in her stays." |
I wonder what hobbies they had, what did they do in their leisure time, what books did they read and what music did they enjoy, or even play?
I wonder if in fifty or sixty years time, the children of my nieces and nephews will be at all curious of their ancestors, as I am of mine?
I am trying to do a write-up of my childhood days, on my blog called ‘Early Days in Bournville‘, but where do I document all these other bits and pieces which do not really fit into my ‘childhood’.
Here, is the answer.
A miscellany of family events and photos, from all the 'other' days.
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| Aunty Gladys - 1905 |
Of course photographs can be looked at easily, but not so for negatives.
From over a hundred years ago until quite recently,
all photography involved taking
‘negative’ images, and then printing ‘positive’ pictures. Many of the ‘positive’ photos were lovingly given away to family, friends and relations, and all that was kept, were the little strips of negatives in their faded paper envelopes.
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It is these long neglected negatives that I have been slowly sorting, viewing and printing. Years ago one would need a ’darkroom’ and maybe an enlarger to get prints from these, but luckily, technology has come to the rescue and a scanner/computer gives us the positive image without the need for chemicals.
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| 2 ¼” square format negatives |
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My Grandfather was a chemist by profession.
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| Grandpa David |
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He left home in Swansea and came up to study chemistry at a college in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire.
It was actually there that he met my Grandmother, the caretakers daughter.
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| Grandma Alice. |
They were married and moved to live in Bournville where my Granddad open a Chemists shop ‘down the road’ in Stirchley.
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| The Stirchley shop - Grandpa (left) and his assistant. |
In those day, chemists not only dispensed medicines but they also developed camera films and printed off the positive photographs.
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| A replica Chemists - Milton Keynes Museum |
They were mainly ‘contact prints’ where the negative, is placed in contact with the photographic paper. This produced a print the same size as the negative used in the camera. In those days nearly all holiday snaps were 3” x 2” or thereabouts.
Usually taken on a ‘box camera’ with a 120 film.
Enlargements cost more money and were reserved for special occasions like weddings.
Grandad, used to use a plate camera in those Edwardian times, and I still have one of his. It’s looking very ‘tired’ and needs a bit of repair to the bellows. I know how to make bellows, but where can I get the correct material?
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| Grandpa's 'half-plate' camera. |
The next cameras I remember seeing used a slightly larger film than the old 'box' cameras. It took ‘postcard’ size photos. My Aunt, (grandads daughter) had one like this, and we also still have it ‘in the family’ so to speak. My Dad saved most of these,
and I think my sister now has a huge cardboard box full of old cameras somewhere. (?)
But without these, I would now have no photographs, or perhaps, a very few, taken by other people.
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| Grandpa, as I remember him at Maryvale Rd. |
Thanks to Granddad, taking up chemistry, and then my father following on with an interest in photography, I have these boxes and boxes of negatives and photos.
Around 1956 my Father joined the Camera club at Cadburys and of course he couldn’t turn up with a Kodak ‘Brownie’, so he must have saved up hard and splashed out on a nice new German Zeiss camera.
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| The Zeiss Ikon camera. |
It was a 2 ¼” square format and took excellent pictures. When I was sixteen (1958) he bought an even better one, a Minolta twin lens reflex and I was given the old Zeiss. I used that for years and so I too, have boxes and albums full of hundreds of prints not to mention all the slides and negatives.
I last used this camera in Austria in 1983.
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| Ziller valley - taken from the last carriage. Going backwards! |
This blog is of course, more of a ‘family-history-photographic-album’,
putting names, places and if I have them, dates to these old prints.
It is of course an ‘open album’, for anyone to view, and you are all most welcome.
I just hope the younger family members take an interest too.
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