We all start somewhere, and here is my very first successful photograph. It was taken with a Kodak Bantam camera of 1938 vintage, late of my grandfather, and I still retain it, complete with original art deco box and instruction manual. I can no longer use it, as the Kodak VP828 film it requires has long ceased to be available. With just eight exposures per film, my schoolboy pocket money allowed me to take just four pix per month - so I learnt how to make the best of each exploratory exposure.
What impeccable taste I had in buses though! Here we see not only my favourite marque, an AEC Regent V, but it also carries my favourite make of body, by Charles H. Roe, and it is in the light blue and grey livery of my favourite operator of the time, the Executors of Samuel Ledgard Ltd. The unusually-registered 1954U was one of the final batch of six buses delivered new to Samuel Ledgard, in 1957. They represented a departure from the norm by being AECs - Ledgard had previously been loyal to Leyland for its new deliveries. The location is outside Ledgard's Otley depot, and the date was 11 June 1966 - three days before my 16th birthday.
The shiny car alongside is clearly of the Hillman Imp family, but the extra brightwork suggests that it is a badge-engineered Singer Chamois. Fancy naming a car after a window-cleaner's wash-leather...
Tags: 1966 otley yorkshire westyorkshire aec aec_regentV roe charles_h_roe samuel_ledgard 1954u vp828 kodakbantam singerchamois
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The recent passing of my father prompts me to post this tribute to my parents, Basil Joseph Evans (1926-2014) and Vivien June Tamara Evans, née Beckett, and later Ewart (1928-2007). Present also is our other family member, black cat Mackis (1964-75), who is very reluctantly submitting to having his portrait captured on my father's 1930s Box Brownie that had been reactivated for this occasion in June 1966. My father had just returned from work and I from school, so the two of us grabbed this photo opportunity immediately before dinner. It is one of my own earliest photos, taken with a Kodak Bantam that had originally been my grandfather's. The saw-toothed building is Hull Printers Ltd., Willerby. I recall the gentle whirring of their presses through the night - the Hull Corporation Telephone Directory was one of their contracts.
Tags: parents mother father black cat black_cat willerby hull
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Trawling through my photo archives (pun accidental), I came upon this very early opus, dated September 1966. The back of the print shows it to be my 25th photograph. To put that into context, I ended up clicking the film camera shutter on almost 100,000 occasions between 1965 and 2015, while I have recorded some 40,000 iPhone images in less than five years. This effort was taken with a Kodak Bantam camera that used VP828 film, offering just eight exposures per film.
The scene is the North Wall on Grimsby Fish Docks, with GY321 Thuringia among the trawlers lined up there.
It is only today that I have delved into the Thuringia’s story. She was one of a Royal Navy order for nine Military Trawlers to fulfil minesweeping and anti-submarine duties. Constructed at the Cook Welton & Gemmell shipyard in Beverley (where vessels were launched sideways into the River Hull), she was commissioned as HMS Home Guard in 1944.
She was sold into civilian use in 1946, being acquired by Grimsby trawler owners Hellyer’s, taking the name of a previous Thuringia that was mined in May 1940.
The records suggest that the Thuringia’s distant water voyages were over at the time of my photograph. As a steam trawler, she was outmoded and uneconomical compared with her motor counterparts. She was reported as scrapped later in 1966.
I much regret not taking more photos of Grimsby’s key industry. I would not return to the North Wall until 1981, by which time Grimsby’s entire distant water trawler fleet was awaiting scrapping, as per the terms that ended the Cod Wars of the 1970s and Iceland’s extension of its territorial waters.
Tags: hellyer’s grimsby Fish Docks north wall cook welton & gemmell grimsby trawler Thuringia gy321 military trawler HMS home guard
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