Found and Lost

I never find it easy revisiting old workplaces. Even when I've left under amicable circumstances, there is always an underlying awkwardness; almost like a meeting between former lovers. Behind the broad smiles, there is a subtle game of one-upmanship, with each party trying to demonstrate how much they've thrived since the split.

A few weeks ago I returned to my last workplace to collect some stock. The department I'd created had now moved to a separate building and apart from one familiar face, the staff were all new. I felt as if I'd been erased from history.

I wondered why the managing director had offered me my old job back a few months ago. The new building appeared to be well-organised and the staff seemed more industrious than ever. I felt slightly disappointed to see how well they were doing without me.

People looked up with expressions that said "Who on earth is he?" and I couldn't wait to leave, but decided to make some polite conversation first.

Before leaving the job, I'd told my successor about some unique items that we'd found: a 1591 Bible, a box of 17th century books and a collection of Victorian photo albums. I'd been tempted to take one of the albums with me, but it wasn't my property. I'd often wondered how much money the Bible had sold for.

"How did you get on with the Elizabethan Bible?" I asked.

There was an awkward silence for a few moments. "Er...we lost quite a lot of stuff during the move."

It now seems that the 1591 Bible, the Derek diaries and the Victorian photo albums weren't saved from oblivion after all. They merely enjoyed a brief reprieve.

I'm sure you can imagine how I felt.

I'm relieved that I made some high quality scans of the best of the photos. Many of the images have been shared on a number of websites, so the album survives, in a way. You can see the original blog post here and the full album is on this Flickr page.

Sadly, poor old Derek hasn't been so lucky. His countless foolscap binders of carefully typed A4 diaries have been largely consigned to oblivion.


I say largely, because I do have a little of Derek in my attic. I felt able to keep some of his diaries because they had no financial value, so there is probably one more Derek post in the pipeline. I owe him that.

I feel haunted by the loss of the Bible and although I'm glad that I scanned the Victorian photographs, they feel anchorless without their original album. As for Derek, I'm sure that his complete diaries could have been turned into a good book by an experienced editor (however, I should add that finding the extracts I published was rather like panning for gold).

Ironically, I now have enough storage space for thousands of Dereks, but hardly ever come across gems like these any more. Perhaps that will change when I find new suppliers.

There are dozens of recycling companies all over Britain, largely staffed by people on minimum wage, working at great speed. They don't have the luxury of stopping to look properly at the tonnes of sacks and crates that arrive daily. If it's a book, save it. If it isn't, chuck it.

I try not to think about the things that are thrown away. One day, when my business is on a more secure footing, I hope that I can devote more time to saving some of this ephemera, making the best of it available online.

People's lives shouldn't be casually thrown into a skip.

The New Victorians

When someone told me that they'd discovered an album of Victorian photographs, I got excited. Sadly, the actual pictures were a rather disappointing collection of faded images all smaller than the palm of my hand:

But thanks to Photoshop, even a print as unpromising as the one above can be transformed:

Admittedly, this probably isn't the most fascinating image I've come across (although I find it benignly soporific). However, some of the others are more interesting:


This picture may not immediately strike you, but zoom in and it comes alive:


In the photograph below, closer scrutiny reveals a figure in the hallway, a cat in the alley and a smiling Victorian:

I can also detect the trace of a smile in this photo:

Frustratingly, with photos as small as these (which were contact prints from the negatives), the resolution can be improved to a point where you have a tantalising glimpse of people's faces, but no more. Further magnification simply produces a blur.

This street scene and the one below were taken in France or Belgium, but I have no idea where.

Finally, my favourite photograph from the album:

This still life of a mantlepiece and its surroundings fascinates me. Its cluttered look is from an age in which most people had relatively few possessions, cherishing what they had, displaying them with pride.

My comparatively minimalist sitting room only has a couple of photos on display. The rest are on various hard drives, which will be completely redundant when civilisation collapses in 2027.

"Life is Better When You Know More"

This post contains a random selection of things that have turned up at work during the last week.

I suspect that most of them have come from house clearances. Some are book-related, but many aren't and I often wonder how they ever make it as far as my desk. However, I'm glad that they do.

First, a 1960s maths textbook. Although I'm a child of the 70s, I vaguely remember covers like this one. I took them for granted at the time, but today I'm struck by how well designed they are:

Much better than this drab, utilitarian cover from a decade earlier:

I wonder if Brian was aware that he was the object of passionate desires?

Staying in the 1950s, I found a 1951 children's annual and when I opened it, this was the first thing I saw:

Okay, I thought, values have changed and I mustn't jump to conclusions. I'll try another page:

At this point I gave up.

In another 1950s book, I found a leaflet advertising the Chambers Encyclopaedia:

I don't think any of us would take issue with that. But in a list of reasons why learning is good, I wonder how many people would come up with the fifth point:

"So, why do you want to enrol on this degree course Mr Pettigrew?"

"Because I wish to increase my television enjoyment."

The leaflet was used as a bookmark, as was this envelope addressed to my favourite actor, Paul Scofield:

Sadly the letter was missing.

I'm sure that Paul Scofield would have enjoyed this shocking photo:

Victorians caught on camera smiling and playing cards. Outrageous!

Next, five portraits of someone on the journey from childhood to adulthood (alternate title: from hairdo to hairdon't):

And they say the 70s was the decade that style forgot! However, mullets aside, I found these photos fascinating. Most of us have albums that depict our own tortuous paths to adulthood, but the evidence is usually too gradual and cluttered with extraneous detail to convey the magitude of this great transformation.

These photos starkly convey the huge, sometimes terrifying changes that we undergo. I only wish that these pictures covered ten years instead of five.

However, by coincidence I discovered this fascinating sequence of portraits of a girl, taken between 1970 and 1982. I'd just watched a 1970s children's programme on DVD and Googled the names of the cast to see what had happened to them. The younger actors seemed to vanish into obscurity, but one of them - Shelley Crowhurst - popped up on the website of photographer Howard Grey.

Finally, while I can accept that photos, diaries and leaflets are book-related, what about this:

As someone in the warehouse said "80 bob? That's £4! A lot of money in those days."

Why did it end up on my desk? Because, I later found out, someone in the warehouse thought that I was the sort of person who'd probably have a projector. They were right!

It took a while to find my dad's old cine projector amongst the collection of things in the loft that I never use, but can't bring myself to throw away. However, after a long search, this afternoon I watched 'Flat Mates'. I appreciated its subversive narrative structure - the women are naked at the beginning but become increasingly clothed as the film progresses - but felt that it was let down by the cinematography and direction.

Overall, it has been a strange week, but rarely dull.

The Enigma Variations

I found this photo at work yesterday and almost threw it away, but there was something intriguing about the scene. Who was the mysterious figure in the centre who had drawn such a large crowd?

The image was of a fairly poor quality, but I hoped that a high resolution scan might resolve the enigma.

I scanned the image at 1200 dpi, which is more than adequate for most old photographs, and let Photoshop work its magic, enlarging different sections.

Here are the results:

This is the full photo after the colour balance and contrast have been improved (apologies to all fans of sepia). There is a greater clarity, but the figure in the centre remains tantalisingly elusive.

Now everything becomes much clearer, apart from the blurred figures of the men at the front. Is that who I think it is?

A further zoom has expanded the crest above the woman's head to a resolution where some of the writing is legible.

It is, of course, the Royal Coat of Arms, with its motto Dieu Et Mon Droit. I can only assume that it is Queen Victoria who has drawn such a large crowd on a rainy day.

I have no idea where or when this picture was taken. Queen Victoria is wearing black and given that she went into a prolonged period of mourning after Prince Albert's death, this must be the late 1860s, at the very earliest.

Perhaps someone who knows about fashion will be able to determine which decade this photograph was taken in. I would certainly like to know about the significance of these hats:


Scanned at 1200 dpi, the enlarged sections look like a monochrome, pointilist crowdscape by Seurat. Most of the people have their backs turned to us and the few faces we can see are blank and expressionless.

All apart from one - the woman on Queen Victoria's right. She appears to be looking down, in deference to the Queen.

Of course I may be completely on the wrong track. Someone might recognise the enigmatic figure as 'Big Bertha' McMahon, the famous Victorian female heavyweight wrestler, or Dame Cynthia Partington-Ffoulkes, whose Temperance League speeches terrified pub landlords from Portsmouth to Perth.

It could even be an author signing session, perhaps by Mrs Henry Wood, if they did things like that in the nineteenth century.

However, I'm fairly confident that I've discovered a photograph of Queen Victoria.

If anyone has any observations or insights about the time and the place, I'd be very grateful. I would love to know more about this mysterious image.

More Victorians

Yesterday another Victorian photograph album appeared on my desk at work, rescued by someone in the warehouse. Sadly, it wasn't as fascinating as this album, which I found last year, but there were a few portraits which I thought were worth sharing:

I'm not quite sure why this photograph of a Spike Milligan lookalike and his wife was taken at such a jaunty angle.


The boy's face is slightly blurred because he didn't remain still, but the dog was clearly an experienced sitter.

A wonderful, strong face

The husband in this couple from Oban looks like a formidable character

The one intriguing thing about this album is the variety of locations that these photographs were taken in: Cardiff, London, Oban, Birmingham, Aberdeen and Leamington Spa - if this is a family album, they were clearly a product of the huge migration that took place during the early Victorian age, when people left their largely rural homes in search of work.

When he retired, my father traced our family tree and got back as far as the 1740s. The death certificates showed that when they lived in the rural Kentish village that had been their home for generations, my ancestors lived to a ripe old age. Then one of them moved to London and became a cab driver.

Both he and his son died in their early 50s.

More Victorian Photographs

Last month I posted some highlights from a remarkable collection of photographs from the 1860s, which had been retrieved from a skip. Today, another mid-Victorian album was rescued by a keen-eyed person at work.

This selection of photos, which appear to have been taken in parts of East Anglia and Lincolnshire, isn't quite in the same league as last month's find. There are too many studio portraits and most have a stiffness and formality that was, on the whole, refreshingly absent in the earlier album. But there are still some striking images.

Take this, for example:

This almost looks like a modern pastiche of Victorian photographs, as the woman's face seems so contemporary.

The same couldn't be said for the next photograph. When a colleague at work saw it, he confidently announced "Here we have empirical proof that people were much uglier in the past."


The next photo reminded another colleague of a certain novel by Dickens:

When she asked me if I'd ever read "David Copperfield" I almost choked, but after quickly regaining my composure, I agreed with my colleague that the man could have been Daniel Peggotty (certainly not Steerforth).

Open any Victorian photograph album and you will see at least one woman wearing black.

My father hated anything that smacked of the 19th century. He had grown up surrounded by Victorians and took great delight in destroying all of the original features of our 1880s house, pebbledashing the redbrick walls and replacing the sash windows with mock Georgian. When I started wearing long black coats and boots, he was apoplectic with rage: "You look as if you're going to a funeral."

My inevitable retort stopped being funny when his health started to decline.

But although he professed to hate black clothes, shortly before he died, my father confessed that he fancied the woman in the Scottish Widows commercials.

This beard seems to fade out rather than stop. How long is it? Today, a beard like this would stop traffic, but of course, in the 1870s it was perfectly normal and some of my favourite people - Brahms, Darwin and Monet - all sported remarkable, soup-retaining expanses of facial hair.

A mother and son photo I presume. I've noticed that quite a few women in the photos from this period chose to be pictured holding a book - presumably the Bible. I like the idea of having a portrait taken surrounded by significant objects, like Holbein's Ambassadors.

These men appear to be holding some of the tools of their trade:

Is that grass in the foreground? Perhaps this portrait was taken outside, with a portable backdrop and strip of carpet to create the illusion of an opulent interior?

I love this picture. There's a compelling intimacy in this close-up portrait that makes me wish I could know the person in it. And she has beautiful eyes.

A rare outdoor shot, with a mysterious figure in the doorway.

If you ever wondered why people of a certain age had antimacassars on their armchairs and sofas, look at this man's slicked-back hair. Grease is the word.

This was a frustrating album. Most of the photos were developed in Wisbech and Boston, but there were also pictures from places as far afield as Llandudno and London. With no images of notable buildings, it is impossible to determine where these people lived . As far as dates are concerned, only two images are marked: 1867 and 1874.

Last month's Cockerham album turned out to be an important social document. Today's collection is less engaging, but there are still plenty of memorable images and amongst these unfamilar faces, there might be an ancestor of somebody we know today.

Can you see any familiar faces?