20th Century
Scout Camp at …?
Holland, 1949 We shall interrupt my grandparents’ 1947 West Country road trip (to which I shall return) to dip into my father’s 1949 Scout trip to Holland. En route the troop passed a stricken vessel [more…]
Photography
20th Century
Slow Boats To Africa, Part Two
In Part One we followed the journey of Irishman Charles Freeman, on the SS Medic down the west coast of Africa, from Liverpool to Cape Town in 1927. The ship was continuing on to Australia, [more…]
20th Century
Slow Boats To Africa
Previously, in “The Sore Seated Safari”, we followed one Charles Henry Freeman and some compatriots, on a 1929 road trip from the town of Iringa, in Tanganyika, to Nairobi in Kenya. But what were they [more…]
20th Century
The Sore Seated Safari, Part Two
We left our travellers on the evening of September 25th, 1929, as they settled down for a night’s sleep in the village of Bereku, Tanganyika, about 37 miles north of Kondoa Irangi. Today it boasts [more…]
20th Century
The Sore Seated Safari
In the cupboard to the left of my desk, sits a large cardboard box filled with old family photo albums. These arrived in my parent’s house in the early 1980s, after the death of my [more…]
20th Century
Postcard From Innsbruck
Zurück in den Tag Am I allowed to say that back in the day I loved Austria? Yes, it was too expensive, yes it was full of unrepentant Nazis, and yes the whole place was [more…]
20th Century
Postcard From West Germany
Donaueschingen Strict privacy laws and the German people’s well-practiced challenges to any risk posed to that privacy means that Street View isn’t available in the Federal Republic. Identifying the locations of old photographs, in this [more…]
20th Century
Deluge at Lynmouth
Over breakfast on the morning of Friday, August 15th 1952, readers of the letters page of the Ilfracombe Chronicle and North Devon News may have noticed the following correspondence from a Mr Cuthbert Burgoyne of [more…]
20th Century
Nostalia Album, Heading Home
Malaga to Motril and Beyond Having made an heroic 1952 journey from Carlisle to Gibraltar in a Ford 8 in order to visit Aunt Lil, Uncle Rob and cousin Anne, my father and grandparents set [more…]