THE1950s
9193 Stamps, Cards, Photography, Marquetry
As a youngster, I collected stamps – as did many others– but most of my collection was handed down by my father. My main addition to this was when we went on holiday to Austria. There I bought a pack which – to my surprise – contained 600 stamps. Maybe some of these stamps, especially those of my father, would have eventually been valuable; but I ruined all of them by sticking them in the album with Sellotape! I did buy a few stamps from dealers. They sent you stamps on approval and you returned them if you didn’t want them. I still remember the excitement of opening the envelope to see what treasures were in it. I also had a cigarette card collection, but this was handed down from Sid – and I couldn’t add to it (without going through dealers) because they were no longer used.
For a while I took up marquetry. This was very relaxing, cutting the very fiddly pieces of the various veneers and then fixing them in place before polishing the final picture with beeswax. I made a couple of quite passable pictures in this way; one of which was in competition with Sid who made the same picture.
I also did one set of smoked plates. In these you held the plate over a candle until the soot deposited covered the whole plate with black. Then you etched out the picture, in my case a copy of an illustration of a sailing ship from a favourite story based on the East India company. When finished, the picture was sealed with varnish. I put these into an exhibition, at school, of hobbies. The punchline was that my school report that term was poor in terms of Latin, and my mother berated me with the latin comment appended by the headmaster which said ‘I licet hic plates’. It took some time before we realized that he liked my (smoked) plates.
My main hobby later was photography. I remember going into Montague Fisher, the main photographic equipment shop in Birkenhead – long since disappeared – and buying my first Kodak camera. It was not just a box camera but one which had folding bellows. However, I only really started to take lots of photos when I bought an Agfa Karat 35mm camera. It was unusual, however, in that the film (with only 12 exposures) ran from one cassette to another. I bought the film in bulk and packed it into the cassettes myself – so it was cheap to run. But I never really printed the resulting pictures – though I still have the negatives. Unfortunately, as you will see, the reusable cassettes attracted dust and this scratched the film!
hits