Milkman. London.

London Photo Fair

 I was at the the London photo fair today....

Elfindale Road, London.

An atmospheric snowy night on Elfindale Road in London. 1920s or 30s, I think.


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Typing School. 1946.

A Southern Railways official photograph of the typing school at "Room 44, London Bridge" on 14th November 1946.

Men and children

A soldier and his boy.

Men with children. Where are the mothers? In some cases they may have been dead. It seems to have been more common in the past for studio family portraits to have been taken with only one parent (or grandparent) present. 

Yorkshire

From a photographer based in Burnley and Padiham in Lancashire

Festival of Britain. 1951.

I thought I'd get in early for this week's Sepia Saturday theme, which is expositions. This is the 1951 Festival of Britain, held in London on the South Bank of the Thames and still fondly remembered as the symbolic end of post-war economic austerity. The 'Dome of Discovery' on the left and the 'Skylon' tower, both demolished after the festival. Looking closer you can see a group of school boys watched over by a stern teacher and two policemen.

A bit of trivia: one of the consulting engineers on the Dome was Oleg Kerensky, son of former revolutionary Russian Prime Minister, Alexander Kerensky.

For another photo on the theme of expositions see this one I posted a while back.

Ha! Smiling Victorians.

19th century Britain was a very serious place. Nobody smiled in photographs, ever. Well, almost nobody.

London.

Thetford, Norfolk

London: Peace Day, 1919.

On the back of this portrait I found pasted two small photographs of London. Trafalgar Square (top) and Carlton House Terrace on The Mall. Union flags everywhere and Nelson's column is wrapped in a garland. Several Flickr detectives have been poring over these for me trying to establish a date and identify the occasion. The vantage point for both appears to be Admiralty Arch (completed 1912). A sign for the Liverpool & London & Globe Insurance Co Ltd can be seen. They moved to that address in 1919.

Finally, someone came up with this postcard. The obelisks visible on The Mall were erected specially for Peace Day in 1919. I think that nails it. Thank you, everybody!

See some colour photos of the event here.

Penguin Pool, London Zoo. 1930s.

Found in a flea market today. The penguin pool at London zoo, designed in radical modernist style by the Tecton Group.

Jester

Either a professional actor or music hall comedian, or an amateur dressed for a part in a tableau or pageant. He was evidently proud enough of his costume to commission multiple portraits.

Boer War veteran

Unidentified but much can be deduced from his badges and medals. He was in the East Surrey regiment and served in the Boer War as mounted infantry.

Royal Six Bells pub, Wimbledon, London. 1940s

Part of a series that appear to have been publicity shots for the London Electricity Board. They must have either been upgrading street lighting or replacing gas lamps with electric ones. That's a Commer truck. Part of the pub sign "Ro...B..." is visible and this was enough to allow a helpful Flickr user to pin it down for me. It still exists though now disused, boarded up and looking a bit sad. See a recent photo of it here.

Funeral procession of King George V, 1936, passing down Sussex Gardens, London.

Thanks to the great minds of the Flickr group 'guess where London' who swiftly pinned down the street for me. The procession started at Westminster and ended at Paddington station, from where the king's body was taken to Windsor by train.

Toboganning. James Street, Chiswick, London. Feb 1947.

Taken during the grim winter of 1946-47, which was economically disastrous for Britain and helped spur the USA to initiate the Marshall Plan. These kids don't seem to have noticed, however. These houses were demolished in the 1950s to make way for a medium-rise public housing development now known as the 'Hogarth estate'. It is not often you find photographs of housing that was, at the time, considered substandard or 'slum'. Census records tell us that they had only two rooms per dwelling.

WW2 bomb damage at St Thomas's hospital, London.

Scanned from a tiny print, I reckoned I had only a slim chance of identifying this building. However, when I looked at this enlarged version the roof of the building behind was immediately familiar. It is County Hall. The hospital was bombed on 9th September 1940. This wing was demolished and replaced with a modern high rise building after the war. Getty images have this photo, which shows a patient and nurses posing in front of the same section of building before workmen had started to clear the rubble, and this 1940 Pathe News reel also surveys the damage.

Handley Page HP.42 'Hanno'. Croydon airport.1930s

Two photos I found on separate occasions which turned out to be of the same aircraft, both taken at the old airport at Croydon, south of London. G-AAUD registered to Imperial Airways 1930-1940. 'Usual station' listed as Cairo. Named 'Hanno' after the Carthaginian navigator. Wikipedia has some nice photos of her. She was wrecked by a gale while on the ground at Bristol in 1940. Only four HP.42s were built and none of them survived the war. Croydon airport was closed in 1959 and built over with retail outlets. The terminal building survives as a hotel and conference centre.

Ernie and Grace Fordham

I found these two on separate days and it took me a while to realise they were the same couple. They don't look all that different or older in the later photo, even their pose is the same, but somehow much is changed. They were easy to find in the census records, in London in 1870, and then 17 years later, still childless. They appear confident and optimistic in the first photograph, worn out and sad in the second, though putting a brave face on it. On the back of the first photo a hand written note describes them as 'uncle Ernie and aunt Grace'. A neice or nephew inherited these images, no child of their own. We can only guess, but I think they had children and lost them. It was not so unusual in that age. Brave people. I hope the rest of their lives were not too hard.