Return To The Mill

Today is the 750th Sepia Saturday, an internet meme I created back in the days when blogs were king and social media was in its infancy. For 750 weeks lovers of old photographs from all over the world have been sharing their finds and their treasures. This is my 750th contribution.

My featured photograph this week is neither new nor is it a new arrival. It is, however, a new discovery. One of my favourite old family photographs has always been the one of my mother and aunty in a Bradford mill from the early 1930s (bellow). I even managed to get this photo incorporated into the beer pump display used for a local beer brew called “Bobbin Ligger”. It was obviously taken one Christmas and it will have been Legrams Mill in Bradford – the mill my mother worked in before she got married.

Whilst sorting through a box of old family photographs the other day I came across a similar photograph, almost certainly taken in the same mill at the same time, which shows a different group of mill workers. Together, both photographs provide a stunning insight into the kind of world my mother grew up in, a world which is now almost a hundred years in the past.

750 weeks is a long time for an internet meme to survive. It is nothing, however, compared to the ninety years the memories in this photograph have survived for.