A mirror of the past
Tucked away in attics and hidden in old shortbread tins are black and white photographs that spark an unusual research project for our scholarly columnist
They are often to be found in attics. They are pasted into albums, held in position with those little black cardboard corners that have a name that must have by now all but disappeared from our vocabulary. They are sometimes crammed into shortbread tins, unlabelled, jumbled in democratic confusion, young and old together, generations intermingled.
They are old black and white photographs – and most households have them, or once possessed them until downsizing or death led to their being disposed of. Sometimes they end up in auction sales of faded ephemera.
Some years ago, I was approached by the curator of a photographic museum in the United States to write an introduction to a book he was publishing. The book featured a collection of orphaned photographs – anonymous photographs of, for the most part, unknown people – that might have been in somebody’s family album but had been lost or passed on by the original owner. The photographs, which were all black and white, had a haunting feeling to them, each of them capturing a moment in somebody’s life – a moment that could be unexpectedly dramatic or completely banal.
Yet each of them, even those that were banal in their choice of subject, had a curious power. Looking at them made me think of the people in them, of their humanity, and their fate. And we, as observers, may sometimes have an idea of what lies ahead for the people in the photograph. So when we see a picture of young men lined up in front of the WWI recruiting station, we know what lies ahead for them, even if they do not.
Once I had finished that introduction, I developed an interest in writing about old photographs, and in due course I wrote short stories based on orphaned photographs from Scottish collections. Such pictures are a gift to the writer: you have your characters engaged in some strange pursuit: the longer narrative follows easily from that. And studying the details in those old photos may be illuminating.
In one photograph, passed on to me by The Sunday Times, a group of young street urchins are pictured in a Glasgow street of what looks like the early nineteen-twenties. There are five boys in the picture – one pushing a hand cart, another leaning against a wall, another sitting on the edge of the pavement, rather as Oor Wullie is pictured sitting on his bucket.
Photographs of children playing in the street in those days are not uncommon. What struck me about these boys, though, was their footwear. The boys were all wearing boots in various states of disrepair. One small boy had boots from which the soles had become largely detached, and must have flapped about uncontrollably when he walked. The boots of another seemed to be held together by leather patches. Poverty had put its wordless stamp on the clothing of these boys just as much as it had done on their faces.
This photo set me off on a quest to find out more about the footwear of children of that period. Obviously, there were some well-shod children in Scotland at the time, but I suspect it was a privileged few who had their own shoes. I came across a particular sort of footwear known as parish boots. These were given by the parish to families too hard-up to buy them themselves.
I was working at the time with a researcher, Anna Marshall, whom I asked to do some further research on parish boots. Anna found mentions of them in newspapers and magazines, but nothing very much. She did, however, find a reference to the embarrassment that could be felt by children who were obliged to go to school in parish boots.
Of course, having any boots could be considered good fortune. It was not all that long ago that some children walked to school in their bare feet. Look at the pictures of children at small rural schools in Scotland during the earlier years of the last century. Look at the boys’ jackets or the girls’ smocks, frequently threadbare. But then look at the faces, at the innocence, at the optimism, at the character; and at the absence of childhood obesity.
‘Poverty had put its wordless stamp on the boys’ clothing’