Photos, mainly from other times
The images below are from a lot of glass plate negatives purchased on Trade Me a few years ago. There is nothing to identify the subjects other than the names Sophy, Andy, Harry and Sam written in the lid of the box. As it seems to be a family of a girl and three boys (two of them twins) that would fit.
The weatherboard house and ferns suggest the colonies rather than Britain and maybe New Zealand? Don’t recognise the school uniform. No photograph of father so maybe he was the photographer.
These three photographs have nothing on them to indicate where or when they were taken.
Some decades ago I came to the conclusion that the photographs were taken at a horse racing track in Auckland but can no longer recall why. There are weatherboard buildings with corrugated iron rooves and the car is right hand drive. Overall it looks too colonial to be Britain and somehow too dour to be Australia.
Maybe it is just an ingrained view on the way folk drive up there.
The volcanic cones of Mounts Egmont and Ruapehu have been favoured scenes from early on for New Zealand photographers. Charles Spencer was no exception.
The first two images are of Egmont, taken from New Plymouth and from the Mountain’s slopes. The last two images are of Ruapehu from a point near workers accommodation.
Mount Egmont from the New Plymouth recreation grounds
Mount Egmont from The Mountain House
Mount Ruapehu from the service road above the Spiral (see also the close-up below).
In this close-up crop you can see workers’ huts on both sides of the road. On the right hand side a woman looks like she is fetching firewood. At the end of the road is someone on horse back. Pretty good resolution in such a pre-digital age.
The following photographs have been extracted from an educational film strip that was used in New Zealand schools during the 1960’s.
The film strip has a copyright notice of 1961 but, chances are, the images predate that by a year or more. Although the images are full-frame, the duplication quality of educational film strips was invariably poor and the soft emulsion degraded easily. The captions in particular are low quality. Still, to those of us who watched these as primary school children it was both fantastic and mythical (TV broadcasts only started in Auckland in 1960, 1961 for Christchurch and Wellington, and Dunedin 1962) and hardly anyone had a TV.
Conveniently the film strip contains three images similar to those produced in the 1890s (see a couple of posts back). The fourth image would suggest both Wellington and Auckland have a long way top go before their railway stations get really crowded.
London Bridge
Cross Roads in London
London and the Thames
Railway Station