Filling a void

The blogging has temporarily slackened for a reason: I've been dealing with some 1,500 old photos. They are not of my own family. Fourteen years ago in 2006, as a retirement project, I began the task of sorting through various old albums, copying the pictures, doing whatever was needed to bring faded shots back to life, and undertaking the hard slog of captioning them all - when taken; where; who was in them.

The captioning was a daunting task, left mostly unfinished when I had to stop in 2008. And yet it was such a worthwhile thing to do. Nobody else, apart from the original (now deceased) owner of the albums had made any earlier attempt. I'd been encouraged to apply my usual method and patience to this big project, which might take a year or two to finish.

So I first copied every shot with my camera, to digitise them all (they were glued into the albums, and couldn't be detached for scanning). Then, bit by bit, I set about deducing who was who, and when the picture must have been taken. And possibly where. The inked comments on the album pages helped somewhat with dates and locations, and often with putting names to the faces, but many shots needed comparison with other shots of apparently the same event before I could type in a confident caption. I grew familiar with the people in these photographs, and after a while could make good guesses concerning their age, which, knowing when they were born - I had constructed family trees to refer to - would give me an approximate photo date if one were lacking. Clothes, shoes, hats and hair styles helped too.

Most of the shots were from the period 1900 to 1950. The people in them had mostly died before I began my work, and my sole personal connection with them might be that I had seen their grave, or (in one instance) had become marginally involved in their terminal care, but still without actually meeting the person concerned.

For all I know, they have all died now, fourteen years on. It's not my family, and I have had no news.

1,500 shots, which show children growing up, doing things in middle life, and then growing old. That's fascinating in itself. But the thing that really took my interest was what a superb historical record it was. And not just to see how people behaved and dressed seventy or more years ago.

Charabanc outings to Brighton. Little girls in party dresses; a little boy with his tin pedal-car. Cricket teams posing for a shot. Stoolball teams too. (Stoolball is a Sussex game mainly for women that predates cricket, played with a round wooden bat) Some of the early pictures depict the Royal Flying Corps (lately renamed the RAF) in the First World War - the flight crew, the biplanes, the trucks, the formal portraits of keen young men. How barrack life was for women training as ambulance drivers and nurses on this side of the Channel. Actually, it didn't look too grim. There were light-hearted scenes of flight sergeants playing tennis with the girls; and nurses having a dip together in the cold Kent sea in fetching costumes, or queuing in silk pyjamas outside the bath-house. No hint of the trenches in these shots, but it was still the same war.

Then further shots when peace came, and the ravaged Picardy and Flanders countryside could be visited. Belgian towns partly in ruins. But untouched villas too. Tea parties, pet goats, big cars. Interesting to see that straws were used in iced drinks in 1924. And the tourist sights. There was a shot of the very railway wagon that was once General Foch's mobile HQ, and later used for signing the Armistice. Taken when the wagon was on exhibition in Paris in the mid-1920s. (The Germans, humiliated by the terms of the Armistice, seized this wagon when they occupied France in 1940 and destroyed it in 1945. You now see just a replica)

In the 1930s, too. Pictures of Queen Mary in 1935 (the wife of George V, then staying at Eastbourne to improve his failing health), seen at Pevensey Castle. A jaunty visit there from his son the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, and his entourage. Waving to the crowd, enjoying the photo-opportunity. Lloyd George supporting a local candidate at an Eastbourne by-election. All in high collars and moustaches. I'm not certain who took these photos, but they must be rare survivors.

Then the 1940s. Nothing much during the war, but sunny shots of holidays in seaside resorts that had re-awakened from their wartime slumber. The faces were ten years older, ten years more careworn.

And then into my own era, a small overlap.

Enthralled, I'd spent an awful lot of time and effort on these pictures back in 2006 and 2007. Then two days ago, thinking about the 'lockdown' photo projects I could get on with, I remembered that I still had them on one of my external hard drives. Why not get them out, and finish the job of captioning them? So that's what I've been up to.

I could in fact have tackled many more than 1,500 pictures. I discovered quite a lot more that I'd taken but had never edited. At least another 1,000 shots. They looked very interesting, but I decided to leave them alone. You have to draw a line somewhere.

Two days work, and I had those 1,500 photos finally done. It had been an engrossing two days. What now? Was I just going to put them away again?

No, I thought. The labour I'd put in had given me something of a stake in those pictures. They were indeed 'my shots' in the sense that the copies I'd made in 2006 were done by myself, with my camera, and I'd performed all the editing, sorting and captioning work.

But the originals weren't my shots; nor were the people in them my family. I didn't own the original images, and the fact that the families shown in them weren't my own kith and kin made it impossible to share them with the public. Setting aside notions of formal copyright, I certainly couldn't use any of these shots in a blog post, nor publish any on Flickr, simply because it was impossible now to seek permission. On the other hand, I could - and very much wanted to - incorporate these pictures in my private collection of Best Pictures. I wanted history-laden shots to fill a yawning gap in my own family record.

For my family hadn't been camera-minded, and there were very few pictures around before I myself started taking photos from 1965. Dad had taken only a few still pictures, using an old box camera, a Kodak Brownie, preferring instead to dabble in home movies. Mum took nothing at all. So instead of having a suitcase-full of old photos, my parents had just three or four dozen only, half of them of myself and my little brother as babies or young children. A handful of Dad when growing up. Just the one picture of his father, and one of his mother. One of Mum's mother, and no shots whatever of her father. Nothing else. A most meagre collection. A void in the family history.

But those 1,500 pictures could help fill it.

I'm reminded of the predicament of the Replicants in the 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner. Artificial humans, created as fully-formed adults, who never had a childhood populated with older people. So, characteristically, a Replicant would tend to collect old photos - a treasured, well-thumbed personal collection of other peoples' histories. Just to give themselves the illusion that they had once been children, with proper parents, surrounded by a host of brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles and grandparents, with houses and favourite toys, and places the family visited often. A comforting cushion of reminiscence, fuelled with real pictures - just not of their childhood.

Because they'd had no childhood, no history at all. Each Replicant had been manufactured, as most, only four years ago. And they were human enough to find that thought unbearable. They hungered to have a background, any background that looked plausible, that might fit. And they needed to relate to the people in the pictures, convincing themselves that - say - the child in that shot, with those parents, had been themselves. They needed to belong, almost the most human of urges.

I can easily see that, as a psychological matter, I do need a dense photographic background going back decades, one that my own parents did not provide. I think it's perfectly understandable why I want those 1,500 shots to refer to, incorporating them into the Best Shot Collection that I carry around with me on my phone. Treasured exactly as a Replicant would treasure them. People I mostly never knew, but in a way a surrogate 'family'.

Is it sad, or weird? Or a presumption? Am I playing games with ghosts? It doesn't matter. It meets a need and fills a void.

Remember that I was never part of a big family, and now have no immediate family at all. On the Dommett and Carlson family trees, I'm a dead end. Isolated at the tip of my own branch, far from the main trunk. A yellowing leaf, in her autumn already. The winter winds took my parents years ago; my only sibling likewise; and there are no young leaves fluttering bravely around me, for I have no children. No wonder I might want to adopt some strangers for company.