Northern Capitals 4 – After Lunch
So here we are: page 4 of the Northern Capitals album and we are still in Marienlyst just having had a very pleasant lunch at the hotel, What better time to take a group photograph – and what a group it is.
Monthly Archives: March 2018
Ten From The Pub 7 – Anchors Away
Anchor Inn, Brighouse (c1970)
There has been a pub next to the Anchor Bridge over the Calder and Hebble Navigation in Brighouse ever since the canal was constructed in the 1750s. For most of that time, the pub was quite reasonably called the Anchor Inn, but for some reason it was decided that it needed a new name for the twenty-first century and it was rechristened The Bridge. The current building dates back just over one hundred years and is the third on the site : the original 1750s pub was rebuilt first of all in 1859. The Anchor has a long association with music : in the early years of the twentieth century the police tried to close it down because it was guilty of “habitually employing professional female musicians“. I remember the pub best in the 1970s when Rod Marshall was the Landlord. He was a gifted jazz musician himself and succeeded in attracting a host of local – and in some cases – international jazz musicians to play at the pub. And, if the police would care to take note, I recall that a number of them were women!
Ten From The Pub 6 : Warts From A Saddle
Saddle Hotel, Market Street / Russel Street, Halifax (1965)
Hidden behind the undoubted delights of the Mixenden Gala Queen on the back of a lorry, is the undoubted splendour of the Saddle Hotel. When I took this photo in 1965 it was an integral part of Halifax Borough Market, but a year later it closed down, and shortly after that it was pulled down. It was replaced by the concrete monstrosity that still sits there, like a wart on the fair face of the Borough Market.
Northern Capitals 3 : Yours Truly
The question I have been asking myself since I acquired this 90-year-old photo album is, who took the photographs? I am now on to page three and I find the first hint of an answer. A photograph has been removed – as far as I can tell, the only one to have been removed from the collection – and it is captioned: “Yours Truly at Frederiksborg Castle”. All I am left with is a photograph of Marienlyst Hotel.
I have purposely not examined the rest of the album in any detail, so it may be that there are further clues down the line as to who took the photographs and put together this fine photo-journal of a 1925 tour of the Northern capitals.
Northern Capitals 2 : The Ghost Of Kronburg
We continue on our tour of Northern Capitals via the 1925 photograph album I bought at an antique shop. We are still in Kronburg in Denmark, and we get to meet “the sentry on the platform where the ghost walked”, as we wander through the sunlit courtyards of the old castle.
Our photographer appears, by chance, to have captured at least half of the ghost – and a particularly well-dressed ghost he appears to be.
Ten From The Pub 5 : Fallen Apples
North Bridge, Halifax (1966)
You might need to search a little to find the pub in my photo of North Bridge in the mid 1960s, but there, at the end of the bridge on the left of the picture, is the eighteenth century Pine Apple Hotel. When Burdock Way ploughed its way down the hill and over the valley a couple of years later, the Pine Apple was sadly demolished.
Northern Capitals 1 : Kronborg Castle
Whilst wondering around an antique shop this afternoon I discovered a little old album of photographs, modestly enough priced at just £8. It contained about fifty photographs, all taken on a cruise on board the SS City Of Nagpur in July and August 1925. Most of the photographs are captioned and they provide a fascinating record of a European tour undertaken almost one hundred years ago.
What better way to celebrate this little piece of forgotten history – this collection of forgotten memories – than to revisit the photographs and revive the memories.
The first photograph is titled “At Kronborg Castle, – Elsinore” and shows what must be a group of passengers about to enter the sixteenth century Danish castle that was forever immortalised by Shakespeare in his play “Hamlet”.
Ten From The Pub 4 : Wither The Withens
WITHENS HOTEL, WAINSTALLS, HALIFAX (1965)
It is not the best of photographs, but it has a certain historical interest as this old inn was gutted by fire in 2001 and converted into a private residence soon after. That, I think, was my late sister-in-law consulting the map, and that might even be me next to her. Which means that this photograph might well have been taken by my brother and not me. All that can be said is that he is a far better sculptor than he was a photographer!
Harry’s Cousin With A Smile
Our Sepia Saturday theme image this week features a magnificent photograph of Florence Timms on her wedding day in 1928. I know nothing of Florence other than that she was the niece of the Vancouver printer and photographer Philip Timms (1874-1973). I know even less about my match image other than it was taken in Bradford and it features a distant relative. Like Miss Timms, however, she clings on to her bouquet as though it was a lifebelt and she occupies the same historical corridor – somewhere between the first and second world war. I have two copies of the photograph, but the only clue I have about the identity is that pencilled on the reverse of one of the copies is the information “Harry’s cousin”. Whoever she is, she looks happy enough: which is more than can be said for Miss Timms. As far as she is concerned, she has not been remembered for being a happy bride, but she surely will be remembered as being the subject of a stunning photograph.
