Black And Brown And Coastal Barges

 

Black Swan Passage in Halifax, so named because it was a passage down by the side of the old Black Swan Inn on Silver Street (approximately where Yates's Wine Lodge is today). This black and white photograph does it justice. For the sake of balance, however, I need to take a white and black photograph of the White Swan Hotel.

Artificial Intelligence can do wonderful things these days. Give it an old black and white photograph, press a button and suddenly it has all the colours of a rainbow. There again, give it one of your of photos of Halifax back in the 1960s and it suddenly has ... fifty shades of mucky brown.

In the mid 1960s, my brother bought an old Humber Keel barge called "Brookfoot" and converted it into a houseboat and studio. After doing the conversion work in Brighouse Canal Basin he then sailed it to the continent and around the canals and waterways of Europe. This photo is from the first time we saw the barge, before the conversion work started.

You could easily mistake it for a coastal view - coastal hills giving way to a grey, coastal sea. There's even a schooner sailing off to distant lands. The sea, however, is a sea of gorse and heather, the schooner is the stone built Stoodley Pike monument on the hills above Todmorden. It's coastal Calderdale.

Thornton And Snowden; Rooftop And Desktop

 

This picture of Thornton Square in Brighouse is from a vintage postcard published in the early 1920s. It had only been called Thornton Square for a few years when the postcard view was taken. It was named after Robert Thornton (1836-1918), who gifted the town a clock, a fire engine, and a place in the record books for being the oldest Mayor in England at the age of 78.

Wanting a suitable illustration for the 1st of May, I turned to my collection of political vintage postcard and find a fine portrait of Philip Snowden MP. Snowden was as full of contradictions as a chocolate teapot - converted to socialism after researching a speech he was due to make on the evils of socialism, eventually becoming Labour's first Chancellor of the Exchequer and then being expelled from the Labour Party for his support of the National Government in 1931. 

I seem to remember taking this photograph from somewhere up Beacon Hill Road in Halifax in the early 1970s. The rooftops created a kind of geometric pattern of the type you would get in school text books when you were required to calculate the angles. The TV aerials added a Mondrianesque quality. Stone and steel, slate and chimney pots: a Halifax skyline.

I'm a desktop kind of chap. I don't hold with these new-fangled laptops or the tablets you can settle down in an easy chair with. Give me a good, old-fashioned wooden desk any day of the week, the kind you can pile real books on, not to mention a bang-on-the-keys typewriter as well. Here's my desk from 57 years ago: I can remember it as if it was only yesterday.

Towering Love And Lifeboats In A Pond

 

As far as I know, this is a family member; it was part of a collection of family photographs handed down to me by my Auntie Annie. That means she is probably a Burnett - and she has that kind of broad, Yorkshire, slightly eccentric look that is common to our family. The photo carried the caption "To my dear niece with best love," which suggests that it is probably Ruth-Annie Burnett (1874-1931) of Little Horton, Bradford.

A trip into Sheffield last night reminded me how much the city has changed since I lived there 40 years ago. This photo of mine from the early 1980s is an even starker reminder. This was Ponds Forge when it was still forging steel rather than creating swimming and diving champions.

A view of a Halifax hillside sandwiched between two cooling towers. The two towers were affectionately known to the locals as "Salt" and "Pepper," and together they created a kind of structural condiment set in what is now Sainsbury's car park. They were eventually demolished in 1974, although it took two attempts before they were finally flattened.

The three subjects of this 1950s "Found Photo" look like they might have been hired from Central Casting. You half expect Terry Thomas to appear with a tennis racket or Margaret Rutherford to waddle on in a fur stole. I'm not sure where The Lifeboat Inn is (I'm hoping someone might tell me), but it is now my ambition to go there.

Certain Bridges And Wide Bad Photos

 

A moment snatched from history: a gathering of objects, people and places. At one time they meant something to someone - your Aunty Bess, or Jean's mother before her stroke. Now the objects and people rearrange themselves and mean something about the passage of time - that lamp, those hills, that certainty.

For almost 150 years, the Lilly Lane footbridge has carried people over the busy railway lines and over the Hebble Brook next to Halifax Station. These days it provides safe passage over a car park, but that doesn't detract from its importance nor for what can pass for beauty on a grey rainy day. My photo dates from the late 1960s, but you could get almost the same view today.

Those who are familiar with Skipton today will instantly recognise this scene from a vintage postcard. The streets were perhaps a little wider then, the shops a little neater, and I wouldn't advise anyone to stand in the middle of the road these days. The postcard was sent to my great uncle, Fowler Beanland, from an unknown cousin George, who lived in the town.

It's not easy to take bad photographs these days. The dullest of smartphones can deliver a perfectly exposed image with the click of a pretend shutter in the most challenging conditions. You do, however, miss out on those odd occasions when a bad photograph turns out good - this grainy, dull photo of Old Lane in Halifax is a good example.

Looking Up At Halifax

 

The first of a little Easter mini-series, "Looking Up At Halifax". This building on Silver Street is one of my favourite buildings in the town. It is sad and empty now, but I remember it in the 1950s and 60s as a thriving furniture store. If I won the lottery, I'd buy it tomorrow and stock it out with studio couches and G-Plan dining room sets.

Looking Up At Halifax 2 : To me, this will always be the Halifax Building Society Headquarters. I was leaving the town as the new Trinity Road HQ was arriving, and by the time I returned, everything had changed names. This was the building I got my pass book from and it was here I brought my savings box for emptying. Before the Building Society moved in, in 1921, it was a department store. Another grand building.

Looking Up At Halifax 3 : Any picture of Halifax's beautiful Borough Market risks opening the floodgates of nostalgia. Why can't it be full of lovely, quaint shops selling biscuits from large tin boxes? Why can't you get divi by quoting your Co-op number anymore? Forget all that for the moment; just look at the building and rejoice that it is still there.

Looking Up At Halifax 4 : Three buildings, three styles - let your eyes wander over this rich architectural tapas. On the left the former Halifax Post Office (solid and serious). In the centre, Post office Chambers and the west entrance to the former Arcade Royale (grandiose and rich). On the right, the white Marmo slabs of the arcade buildings (modern and fancy). Tasty.

Iron Mothers And 1905 Angles

 

There's enough scrap iron visible in this photo of mine from the late '60s or early '70s to keep a Scunthorpe blast furnace busy. It was taken looking down Blackledge, Halifax, towards Beacon Hill in the background. These days, the stone has been cleaned up, and there is half a forest lining the hillside. The cobbles, however, still make patterns in the street.

This lovely lady appears on the second of the ten Victorian photographs I bought whilst I was up in Whitley Bay. The only clue to her identity is a pencilled caption on the reverse of the photograph stating "Mother When Young". Try taking a photo like that on your smartphone!

This photograph dates back about 45 years to the time when we were living in Sheffield. In the Campo lane area of the city, there were some blocks of flats dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, and I would often wander the staircases and landings looking for angles and patterns.

This image of Doncaster's Corn Exchange is taken from a Vintage Postcard in my collection. The only thing written on the card is a single date - November 8th 1905. That was the day Alfred Buchi was granted a patent for his invention of a turbocharger, the day London was beset by a thick fog, and William R Hearst lost the race for Mayor of New York. And the day someone bought a postcard of Doncaster's Corn Exchange.

Nine Trees Walking The Hills

 

I used to call this feature "Twelve From ...", but what with tariffs and trade wars, it will have to be "Nine from ..." until further notice. This, therefore, is nine photographs from last week, or Nine From The Tyne.

As Saddleworth Road runs into the town of Elland, there is a strange outcrop of trees sprouting out of the tops of truncated mill chimneys. This phenomenon is unique to this area and biologists travel from around the world to witness it. My 1980s photo captures it at an early stage of development, but I am having difficulty tracking down which chimney this actually is.

This picture of my grandparents walking along some seaside pier was taken, as far as I know, in the summer of the year peace returned to Europe. My grandmother looks almost penguin-like in her stance, but she is clearly happy. Enoch, my grandfather, looks distracted and strangely divorced from the seaside merriment. Within three years, when I came onto the scene, he had already left it.

With the hills and valleys around these parts you can position yourself on top of a hill and make eyes at the next hill. The towers and chimneys, factories and offices, that populate the valleys fall into perspective, becoming support acts to the beauty of raw nature.