Amongst my 1965 negatives, the shots that I took to start or finish off a film are often everyday scenes from home life that wouldn’t normally get recorded. This shot, which comes just before the Richmond Castle photographs, is my mum’s car, a Triumph Herald Coupé taken in our back yard.
We did once fit our family of five into mum’s coupé, even though there were no seats in the back. More comfortable was dad’s Standard Vanguard Estate, registration RHL 777, which he bought from our friend Jack Buckle’s garage.
My Letts School-Boys Diary, Monday, 5th April, 1965: ‘Cross country – Stef and Fred running on intermediate. Got photos of them (3 in all).’
Other than rather poor contract prints, I haven’t been able to get any images from my 127 negatives until now, using my scanner. Once again, I’ve coloured them in Photoshop.
Lucky me, I’d got out of running, perhaps because I’d been off with tonsillitis a week earlier or, more likely, because the school houses, Marsden, Pickard, Haig and Bentley were entering more energetic runners, such as my friends ‘Stef’ (above) and ‘Fred’ (below).
With the start of the Easter Holidays, this was a busy week for me, finishing off an astronomical telescope kit and planning our next home movie, a science fiction epic:
Bill and I also had our club magazine to print, featuring an article on a ‘whirlwind’ at Painthorpe, reported by ‘Stef’ and a fire at school:
FIRE AT OSSETT GRAMMAR SCHOOL
Smoke poured out of a workman’s hut at O.G.S.
Workmen fled in terror. 5 yds away stood a tank of petrol. It took 2 fire engines 10 minutes to get the blaze under control. Thanks to Ossett Fire Brigade no one was hurt.
R.A.B., HJNC News, no.4, April, 1965
Hostile Aliens
The big news though was our alien invaders movie going into production:
All sorts of special effects, tricks and camera angles were used. In filming one scene in which a soldier, R. Ryan, was burnt I, the camera man , was engulfed in flames. The most effective scene was one in which a model vehicle moved towards the alien’s rocket.
The best angle short showed soldiers running off the top of the picture.
As yet the film is not complete the second half will be filmed soon.
R.A.B., HJNC News, no. 5
Rather like the young Steven Spielberg character in The Fabelmans, I persuaded my sister to guest star as the ‘Hostile Alien’, complete with papier-mâché head which I shaped around an old bucket that my dad used to force rhubarb. My brother Bill meanwhile drafted in friends to play the ill-fated World Security Patrol, joined, as in most of our films, by my friend John as an action hero.
At that time there were always a few wartime helmets still kicking around. For the final scene involving an ‘Atomic Cannon’, we had to wait until autumn, when fireworks became available.
With a bit of help from the Adobe Illustrator this is me in January 1965 with my leg in a cast after breaking my leg hurrying home on an icy Boxing Day evening to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe.
My mum had added a long zip to my trousers to fit over the cast. I rather liked the new ash-wood walking stick which Pinderfields Hospital had loaned me so I was not pleased when some of my classmates used it for an improvised game of golf, scratching the handle 😮
I’d like to say that the grainy quality of the photograph was deliberate but it was probably caused by thermal shock to the film in my early attempts at developing it in a Paterson’s developing tank.
Barbara’s brother John had a starring role in an ‘ages of man’ illustration I drew for Dorling Kindersley, which, as far as I remember, never made it into print. Also appearing, John’s oldest son Peter and his younger brothers Simon and Richard.
For the older versions of John I photographed his dad Bill.
It’s so easy to take a reference photograph on you phone these days but back in 1994 I had a print film from a trip to Scotland to finish off and I took it in to one of several processing shops in town and went for extra large prints.
It would have been so much easier with digital photography and you might think, what a shame that John’s performance on the guitar wasn’t recorded as a video clip along with the song but in reality he couldn’t play a note.
We’re looking through old albums, putting together a short book of memories of Barbara’s brother John. Going back to the pre-digital 1960s, 70s and 80s are plenty of groups at parties, children standing on lawns and a couple of formal wedding groups, but for me the stand out images are by the street photographers in seaside towns.
The close up of John and Margaret reminds me of films from the Swinging Sixties such as Michael Winner’s The System, where Oliver Reed plays a seaside street photographer, but we need John on his own on the cover, so we’re going for another seaside town photograph.
The original of this photograph is small and in black and white but I couldn’t resist using Photoshop’s colourisation neural filter on it. I think that it’s worked well here.
Although Barbara has just pointed out that Margaret’s pink cardigan has one yellow sleeve. I better correct that.
Remembering John Morrisey, the lovely, larger-than-life neighbour of Barbara’s brother John, who died suddenly yesterday morning. Barbara’s brother John died early on Saturday morning, after 3 months in Pontefract Hospice that was expected, but the death of his neighbour John a few days later came as a shock.
