Family Photographs

My vision issues make reading and participating in comment quite challenging just now, but I continue to enjoy your blog posts which the computer reads for me. 

A similar sequence in families throught the Western world, labelled in albums if they are lucky.

Early in mine, among the various family lines, are my great-grandparents around 1908. My great-grandfather is resplendant in is uniform, a newly qualified Master Mariner.

Later there are lots of weddings. Don't they all look well!

Now a very faded picture of his son, my grandfather, with his new wife, on holiday with friends and cousins at Mablethorpe Lincolnshire after the Great War. Along comes a son, my father, then a daughter, my aunty. They begin to look more prosperous and go on days out to the Yorkshire coast. My grandfather sits on the beach in his hat and suit looking uncomfortable.

The children grow older and get married. My father and mother help tend the family allotment. Then I appear as a baby and begin to grow. Dad plays and entertains me for hours, carrying me around town on his bicycle crossbar seat, and then does it all over again six years later with my brother. Wasn't he fantastic! Again we take holidays on the Yorkshire coast, and further afield too.

We even have audio recordings and bits of digitised cine film from the nineteen-sixties.

I look at it all over and over again obsessively, and digitise it, and add pictures of my own family. I leave everything well-organised for the future.

And in that future, my children have little more than passing interest in the earlies pictures of people they never knew. And their children even less.

"So who was he? Is that some kind of seaman's uniform?"  

I suppose I might be the same if there were photographs of relatives I never knew from 1800, who lived such unimaginably different lives through unimaginably different times. It is too difficult to connect with them.

The whole lot might survive another century at best before being deleted, becoming inaccessible or simply thrown out.

Too Much Television

New month old post, originally posted as part of a longer post on the 19th September 2014. The other part of which was used at the beginning of last month.

We weren’t the last, but late enough for others to exclaim in disbelief: “What! You really don’t have a television?”

Dad thought them a mindless waste of time. After hours talking at work, he was happy to settle down to a book, or poetry, or his bible readings from church, or the B.B.C. “Book at Bedtime”. Mum, when not finishing housework, would be knitting, reading novels from the library or learning lines for her twice-yearly parts with a local drama group. I got through two or three library books a week too, and still had time for other worthwhile activities, not to mention homework. No one needed a television. There was always plenty to do. We were one of the last to have an X- or H-shaped aerial on the chimney stack.

My first viewing memories are therefore all on other peoples’ sets: school friends, the neighbour who regularly invited Mum, with me in tow, to watch ‘Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium’, another relative who let me watch football cup finals on Saturday afternoons, and one of my Mum’s aunts where I went once a week after school for tea. I remember the now forgotten Don Arrol’s brief stint as Palladium compere when he stood in for the ill Bruce Forsyth in 1960, the 1958 FA cup final when Bolton Wanderers beat a tragically depleted Manchester United after the Munich air disaster, and seemingly no end of escapist adventure series on Granada Television which was then the newly-licenced commercial provider for the whole of the North of England.

How many can you remember? How many theme tunes can you still sing? There was ‘The Lone Ranger’, ‘Bonanza’, ‘Rawhide’, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’, ‘The Adventures of William Tell’, ‘The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin’, ‘The Adventures of Long John Silver’, and ‘The Buccaneers’, to name but a few. The only theme tune I can’t remember is ‘The Buccaneers’, despite it being one of my favourite series. The tune was simply unmemorable. But I can still sing you the standby music used by Granada Television before programmes started at five o’clock.

Dad eventually surrendered to the inevitable and bought a set around 1962. I watched the first Transatlantic transmissions over the Telstar satellite in July of that year at home.

But all the many “worthwhile activities” soon disappeared. A year later I was watching the indisputably inane quiz show ‘Take Your Pick’ (the one in which Michael Miles tried to trick contestants into using the word “No”) when news of President Kennedy’s assassination came through. Within a few years, some programmes had become part of the bedrock of British society watched by more than half the population, and activities outside the home gradually dwindled away. For me, homework took second place on Thursdays when ‘Top of the Pops’ and ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ were on.

Dad remained a bastion of common sense. As soon as the television was turned on, he retired to his books, radio and other activities. I’m not quite that good, but I do try. Think of all the skills and knowledge lost to all that television. What goes around comes around. While I sit here trying desperately to improve my writing skills and perfect my pirate voice, my family sit the other room watching that embodiment of triviality, ‘The X factor’. 

originally posted as part of a longer post on the 19th September 2014