photographs in my time

21 December 2008

John (Jack) Ashley Wild, merchant seaman killed during the Atlantic Convoys on November 5th 1940. Jack was my uncle, my mothers brother. He was recalled, after leaving the navy in 1934 to help with the family business, to the merchant navy during the second world war and served on the ss Beaverford between Liverpool and Halifax in Canada on the Atlantic Convoys which kept Britain supplied with food.Without this service Britain would have starved and would have had to surrender to German occupation. He was married to Mable (nee Crelin) and had two children Barbara and a second little girl, who he never saw, Alma. At the end of the war Mable emergrated to Durban South Africa. Ironically Alma married a Dutch sea captain who was with a Dutch/South African Line similar to the routes Jack her father sailed when he first joined the merchant navy at sixteen. Also its ironic that his eldest daughter Barbara emergrated from Sth Africa to Canada where Jack sailed to from Liverpool during the war

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INTRODUCTION

Within this blog I hope to as time permits to show photographs that I , my father, family and friends took since the early 20th century. Some will be scanned in for obvious reasons but todays photographs will be of the digital age.
It is amazing how technology has changed, my father was born in 1908, 4 years after the Wright brothers first flew and 4 years before the Titanic disaster. He was too young for the First World War and too old for the Second World War, but he suffered the poverty in the 1920's due to the great recession and travelled far and wide for jobs including London and Great Yarmouth................

..............He had been everything, all self taught from a butchers boy, bus driver, waiter, cabinet maker, aircraft fitter and mechanical fitter. He saw the Olympics in Germany in 1936, didn't get married till towards the end of the Second World War. He had to live with my mother in her house as his was bombed during the war. My mother ran a chandlers & iron mongery business called Wild's Stores at 270 Old Chester Road on the corner of Fairfield Rd in Tranmere, inherited from my Grandfather (of whom I have some very early black & white photos of) . From this business my mother sold paraffin, coal, pots & pans soap, gas mantles (people still upto the late fifties early sixties had gas lights in their home), tin baths, and a manual washine called a Dolly Tub & Dolly Peg...used may I say with a scrubbing board used by would be musicians in the fifties as a Skiffle Board in a Skiffle Group!
Even in my time growing up in the 1950's the street lights were still gas lit and deliveries of coal, bread milk etc were still by horse and cart. There were some terrible slums (housing) around the area of Old Chester Road but all now have been replaced. Replaced with in my opinion with new slums, small featuureless box housing void of any thought or design.