Page 64 - Phonebox Magazine November 2007

Photographic Memory
by Geoff Bacchus
Colour, texture, form, rhythm and opalescence are all wonderfully portrayed by great artists and by 1950 I was only too sure that, for all my art master’s valiant efforts, my drawing and painting were never going to make the grade. In surly desperation I bought a camera.
Just once in a while Dad had permitted me to handle his precious brownie box camera. They had acquired this in time for their honeymoon. In marriage it is important to get things in proper order so they had a camera right from the start and I later came along as an afterthought; gluttons for punishment they went on to collect three more of the same specie. By 1950 cameras were becoming fairly common which meant there was one in about every eighth household! Mum and Dad were a trifle phased when instead of buying a new one just like theirs for around three pounds I bought a second hand Barnet Ensign for six pounds and ten shillings; this had a proper lens with diaphragm options from f4.5 through to f32, eight shutter speed settings and a focusing bellows which might be raised or lowered a little if required to help correct converging verticals. Mum and Dad found all this somewhat perplexing but if you must allow your bl**dy kids to study physics and chemistry then you must be prepared for trouble. It took a fifteen year old schoolboy some time to amass the money for this, I had half a crown pocket money each week and work was required if I sought more. A local plumber/heating engineer had me do his bookkeeping (Dad was a chartered accountant, whence the introduction) and this paid a guinea each month. During school holidays if I wasn’t tearing round the counties of England with the Youth Hostels
Association I could do a few weeks in the general office of a Stratford firm of timber importers and so snatch three pounds and ten shillings in just one week. So I’d got myself a camera because I knew beauty was so very important for me, but I had no notion how many adventures that camera and I would set in motion, indeed the adventuring continues yet.
The local pharmacist who had been responsible for selecting what he saw as a suitable camera for a beginner soon had me behind the shop of an evening learning to develop my own films and obtain prints from the negatives. As I was already annoying my mother by occasionally turning her kitchen into a laboratory Mr.Wilcox saw it as only reasonable that I should make my own processing solutions. Behind my back he let on to Dad that buying ‘ready made’ would be a heavy drain on a schoolboy’s finances. Mother didn’t mind this stage for she saw it
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as far preferable to having her kitchen used as a distillery for bromine. Too late perhaps for the fumes had by this stage entirely bleached the kitchen walls and the wallpaper through the hall. I can only wonder how patient might I have been had my children treated my wife as I had treated Mum.
Under one roof
If processing solutions might be prepared at home then it was clearly reasonable that the whole process might proceed under one roof. Mum and Dad were quite amenable, after all developers and fixing solutions don’t come with nasty pongs attached but there was the wee problem of light. Our home had huge casement windows to every room and Dad thought the coal cellar might be cleaned up but it took no time whatsoever to prove by one sad trial that even after a thorough scrubbing the coal cellar was far too dusty. A vast sheet of roofing felt was stretched on a wooden frame (removable) which clipped closely over the morning room window. So Mum got her kitchen back and it was Dad’s turn to take the strain – he had all manner of treasures in the morning room. Mr Wilcox was impressed, Mum was delighted and Dad nodded with becoming patience. My parents were both agreed that I had no right to expect their friend to keep his shop open extra hours every week just for my benefit. Nor was I really seen as all nuisance, I only blacked Dad out one day a week. Further the two of them were soon proudly sending my snaps to all corners of the family. No one nowadays would be even slightly impressed by a stream of pictures measuring 21⁄4 by 31⁄4 inches but in those times such things were treasured. Dozens of those early prints still crop up in all manner of cupboards and ancient cartons.
The local photography shop displayed many whole plate photos and I must pass it every day as I headed for school, I was nothing if not jealous and things went from bad to worse when my Uncle Victor got himself a Gnome enlarger. He hardly ever used it, Aunt Madeline insisted he “perform in the bathroom” – her words not mine. But that bathroom was ever hers to require at the drop of a hat. No! Madeline did not like having dirty chemicals anywhere near her clinically clean home and further she could not imagine what possessed Victor to spend around £20.00 on a thing he never quite got to grips with. So, the photo shop had an enlarger and used it, Uncle had one and didn’t properly use it, Uncle had afforded £20.00 and I was certainly not in that league.
The most important component of an enlarger, as also for a camera, is the lens and I was jolly sure the lens on my camera was better than the one on uncle’s enlarger, the back of my camera was removable. Next a pencil of light must be focused through the imaging lens. A pair of moulded 5inch condenser lenses (I certainly couldn’t afford optically polished ones) were carefully spaced by a corrugated paper collar within an old household dried milk canister. No baby today need suffer that sort of ersatz milk! A lamphouse comprised an assembly of bits of plywood and plywood also provided a negative holder. It was crude and looked clumsy but even after obtaining some flex and a torpedo switch for turning the lamp on and off I had myself an enlarger. Dad had watched his crazy son’s antics and he had counted every penny as I allocated my little monies. “Seven shillings and tenpence” he beamed. I can still hear his voice as he added “Well done” and gave me ten bob. A fortnight later Mum and Dad went to visit Madeline and
Victor and presented around a dozen enlargements of pictures the two of them had praised in the smaller size. Madeline had one of these framed and I doubt whether poor Uncle Victor ever poached her bathroom again.
There had been a parents’ evening at school and Father McGill my physics master now had a ten inch by eight inch picture of himself. “Waugh- Bacchus, and to think I’ve never noticed you paying proper attention in class”. For two weeks I was without my enlarger because the school had borrowed it in order to persuade people that the fourth and fifth forms were not entirely beyond salvation. Word somehow got around and I was invited to join the Woodford Photographic Society. The next- door neighbour said “Ooh Geoffrey you are going up in the world” which meant nothing to me, Mother evidently saw them