Searching for the Ford Capri

We’re going on another tour through the photo survey this week but not down a single street. The photo survey pictures were taken by John Rogers between 1969 and 1975, mostly in 1970 and 1971. That’s a few years before my brief time working in the motor trade. I worked cleaning new cars for a garage that had a British Leyland franchise. Some of you who remember the 1970s may remember how awful British Leyland cars were then – the Allegro, the Marina and above all the Princess a car so awful it has been almost obliterated by history. Occasionally my sales manager Bob would acquire a Ford for one of his special customers and we would both welcome these examples of decent automotive technology with some relief. There were Escorts and the new mark 4 Cortina but our favourites were the Granada and the Capri, both genuine classics hallowed by their appearances on TV in the Sweeney and the Professionals. I stand very little chance of finding a Granada in the photo survey pictures (they first came out in 1972) but I might just find a Capri.

So where do you look for a car?

A garage is one place to start. This is one of those garages a few of you may remember where they stack the cars neatly but you don’t have instant access. Most of these cars looked pretty old even in 1970. In terms of design it was a transitional period (but aren’t they all?) between the staid fifties cars like that Rover you can see, the watered down versions of American designs and the hatched-backed days to come.

That’s a Ford Corsair on the left, with its odd pointed nose. Before we leave can I just invite any car enthusiasts to identify any of the cars in these pictures? There was a time when I could have done that but it was thirty odd years ago. I’m not really a car person. I don’t even drive. I just found myself around car people and got interested. Let’s get outside. See where we were?

Here’s another Ford:

But it’s only a lowly Anglia already fairly low on the meter of desirability even by 1970. What’s the one behind it? Addison Avenue must have been a quiet street. Just off it was Addison Place, a strange little converted mews kind of a street overlooked by Campden Hill Towers.

And that car in the foreground would I think be a Ford Consul, the fifties styled precursor of the Granada.

Not all of the British Leyland marques were hideous. That’s a Triumph Spitfire , a traditional British sports car. Other mews streets were full of cars.

Amid the old style cars in this back street of garages an expensive looking sports car, probably Italian. The odd thing I sometimes think is that expensive sports cars still look like that decades later as if that low wide look is the optimum shape.

The mews streets used to be filled with small garages servicing cars. Note the sign: Barclaycard Welcome – something of a novelty then.

A 60s novelty the Mini Moke parked in Linden Gardens. In the same street the opposite of a Mini Moke:

It’s also a Ford, a 60s American model, but I can’t make out the word on the side. I’m sure someone can help me out with that. Below a home grown model:

The Mark 3 Cortina parked in Christchurch Street. A bit of a classic itself. Nearby another puzzle for you:

I should know what this is, it looks so familiar. Someone tell me (No, not the mini.)

The first sighting of our quarry is back at the other end of the Borough in Clarendon Road.

The slightly cluttered styling of the Mark 1 Capri. And having found that one I came across another down in Earls Court.

Is that guy in the window coming back to close the boot?

In the very same street a Mark 2, at last an example of the car that sat in my cleaning bay in Poland Street.

There it is by the fence. For me the Mark 2 Capri represents the mid seventies like no other car, better than the high performance cars of the era. Seeing it in this picture reminds me of a time when the traffic was lighter, the cars were serviced in back streets and the Ford Capri was exciting and glamorous, if you can imagine such a time.

Postscript

As I said above if you can identify any of the other vehicles in these pictures or you have to correct any inadvertent errors of mine, please leave a comment.

Empty streets: Earls Court Road 1904 – part two

Just to get you orientated, this is part of the final picture from last week’s post.

There’s our friend and his horse and above him the office of Hugo’s Language School.

It’s the following day, April 22^nd, and Ernest Milner is back on the Earls Court Road looking at the buildings on the odd-numbered side of the street. Hugo’s Language System is course still with us. So is the London and County Bank in a later incarnation.

In 1909 it merged with the London and Westminster Bank to form the Westminster Bank which later became the National Westminster Bank. If you take a look at the same building today you will see that it has grown slightly with a matching section being built into that empty site.

You can see in this picture that the empty site was quite narrow, that there were contractors in already and that the next building is another bank. The London and South Western was absorbed into Barclays in 1918. Barclays still have a branch in this spot in a completely new building. Banks are one of the great survivors of the high street. That is also true of the institution next door.

The Courtfield Hotel, public house and restaurant. It’s now known as the Courtfield but still offers fine dining on the first floor.

We’re at Earls Court Gardens now. Today there is a two storey Post Office building between this street and Hogarth Road right over the railway line but Milner ignored that. Perhaps the railway company already had it covered. On the other side of Hogarth Road was Ephraim B Goody, fancy drapers and milliner.

Just as at Edwards cross the road there is a man up a ladder making adjustments, possibly to the awnings. Upstairs Goody’s offered showrooms for baby linen and corsets.

On the other side of Hogarth Road Milner didn’t take a picture of Hardiman’s, a dressmaker’s shop and not much of Whitley and Sons, dyers. But he did cover Smith and sons the confectioners who offer lemonade and ginger beer by the glass and Cough No More lozenges. The man with the brush is from the shop next door and he also contrives to get into the next picture.

Here he takes up a proud pose outside Hurley’s Decorative Florist while another man pauses as the picture is taken.

Next door is another growing chain of shops, the Home and Colonial who had over 500 stores by 1904 retailing tea and general groceries. The company was eventually absorbed into the Safeway group.

I said last week we would return to J Rugg and Son, the builders who were working down the road at number 168, and here they are ready to take on any building job.

The last shop Milner photographed that day was Blake and Everett’s grocers according to Kelly’s Directory.

But Mr Everett was not much in evidence if you look at the classic extravagant shop front depicted here. Perhaps he was the sleeping partner, or there’s some other story we’ll never know. Check out the massive milk urn – or is that for some other liquid?

Before we go let’s take a quick stroll back to Goody’s, seen here in a side view of Hogarth Road taken on April 21st.

Mr Milner took the close up view below for some reason of his own.

Perhaps he liked the artist’s palette sign. I’m more interested in my own close up:

Two women stand in the doorway. One is too blurred to see properly. But I think Milner took care with the other lady, perhaps even asking her to stand still.

So her slight smile and enigmatic expression was captured for us to look at more than a hundred years later. I doubt if Milner knew that would happen but I expect he would have been pleased.

Finally on a technical note I should add that the numbering of Earls Court Road has changed a little since 1904 so those of you comparing these views with those of today will notice a few anomalies. many of the buildings are still there of course which will help.

Next week my Christmas present to you, some seasonal darkness.

Empty streets: Earls Court Road 1904 – part one

I just heard on the radio the writer John Banville say something to the effect (apologies for my paraphrase) that the fascinating past was once as dull as the present. So this week’s pictures should in theory be especially dull. The photographer Ernest Milner was up early in the morning again in April and May 1904 to get some accurate pictures of the way buildings looked without the distractions of people and traffic. The railway company which employed him wanted some evidence of the state of buildings near or above their lines in case of legal proceedings against them. So far so dull. But interesting details and interesting people have a way of creeping into photographs.

As the delivery wagon waits to be loaded its motive power has some breakfast.

Not the same day, although I wish it was, around the corner a man half way up a ladder at the West End Shoe Company notices Mr Milner. You can see those insistent big letters better in this picture announcing to the world the size and importance of the furniture warehouse.

Down the road are some more small businesses. The Earls Court Restaurant has an upstairs saloon which caters for large and small parties. As I enlarged the image to read the lettering I saw something I like to find but hadn’t previously spotted:

From the saloon a curious waitress keeps an eye on Mr Milner. Messrs Lanzani, Dolcini and Peechi are the proprietors of the restaurant. Is one of those her surname?

The dog isn’t interested in photography. I don’t think he’s waiting for an appointment with the solicitor, unless the solicitor is bringing him some sausages.

Below the solicitors Hobbins and Co sells cheap stationery and run a circulating library. You can make out a boy in front of the door possibly looking at the vanished dog. A man and a woman watch him from the doorway. People are hiding in these photographs waiting to be found. At the left edge of the picture you can see Earls Court Station. But in the next picture:

Milner hasn’t taken a picture of the whole station. But of course he didn’t have to – he was working for the railway company and they were not worried about their own property. He has given us a ghostly policeman and an odd looking ticket machine (I’d like it to be a “What the butler saw” peep show machine but that isn’t likely).

This is the station ten years later in 1915:

Redman the wine merchants and Thomas A King, coal merchants were still in business but there is a branch of Boots which wasn’t there in 1904.

Brunton’s was a dispensing chemist – the classic set of large dispensing jars are in the window, and next door are Watt and Sons, bakers. The alley is Old Manor Yard where J E Gentle, Job Master can be found.

Shall we go down there?

Milner must have come back a few weeks later to check the back of the building.

After this point the retail establishments give way to residential properties and professional consulting rooms.

At 164 were Whitcomb and Percival, physicians, working next door to Gill and Pugh, solicitors who shared the house with a Mrs Gale. You can see that 168, unoccupied in 1904 has the builders in.

The men at work are J Rugg and son who we will see again but I’m not entirely happy with that ladder lashed to the scaffolding at a precarious angle.

Next door at 170 (and 172) Mrs Beesley runs a boarding house. The woman in the doorway must be a maid.

She’s working herself into a blur of motion and completely ignoring Mr Milner.

After exposing that plate he went round the corner into Penywern Road to take a side view of the house.

I took a close look at the picture to look at the state of the house and was quite impressed by the condition of the brickwork. I reminded myself that these buildings were still relatively new in 1904. I noticed another small detail:

A young man and the back of another horse are just visible. And as we came in with a horse we’ll leave it there. I don’t know about you but I never tire of these photographs and the details you can find in them, so next week we’re crossing the Earls Court Road to take a look at the odd numbers.

Wild, wild west: Buffalo Bill in Earls Court

The pleasure gardens at Cremorne were the kind of mass entertainment enjoyed by Londoners in the mid-Victorian period. There was still something of the 18^th century about them, something a little anarchic and risky, not to mention illicit. Cremorne lost its licence because of perceived or actual immorality. But the appetite for spectacle and large-scale attractions hadn’t vanished, it had simply moved onto newer forms of entertainment.

The Earls Court Exhibition owed its existence to chance. A triangle of empty land had been created by a confluence of railway lines. One developer tried to build a Catholic Public School there but was defeated by financial problems. There was another scheme for housing, but even in the 1880s developers could see that the land was not especially desirable for that purpose. Finally John Robinson Whitley came up with the idea of the Exhibition. He had intended to put on an American Exhibition showing goods and products along the lines of the Great Exhibition and its successors such as the British Colonial and Indian Exhibition which took place in South Kensington in 1886. He postponed his opening for a year because of that event and many of his partners dropped out.  This worked to his benefit. That year he went to Washington to try and interest President Grover Cleveland in the project, and while he was there he saw Buffalo Bill’s Roughriders and Redskin Show.  He booked them for Earls Court’s first season and changed the nature of the Exhibition completely.

The troupe performed in the original triangle of land accessible from Warwick Road. An open arena and stand were created for them.  A second area accessible from Lillie Road and by bridge from the grounds contained a single long exhibition building. This was connected to a third area where there was a pleasure gardens with a switchback railway, a toboggan slide and a large bandstand.

The shows introduced the idea of the Wild West into public consciousness, in this country at least.

The shows were immensely popular and were even visited by the Queen, the Prince and Princess of Wales and William Gladstone (then in opposition, so he must have had some time on his hands).

You can see from the programme that the show contained all the familiar tropes of the Wild West – Indians attacking the stagecoach, gun battles with cowboys, the Pony Express – but also had a more rounded view of  Native American culture such as buffalo hunting and village life on the plains. Not to mention Cossacks and Gauchos.

(These two images are from one of the later shows).

William Cody himself of course had become a fully fledged media figure.

Along with Annie Oakley who fell out with Cody after the first shows but returned later having established herself as a star in her own right.

The Wild West show came back to Earls Court several times and there were other versions after Cody’s last show such as the Golden West / Red Man Spectacle of 1909. The cowboys look a little more like showmen in this picture:

But we get the idea.

The other well known name from Buffalo Bill’s show was Long Wolf, an Oglala Lakota Sioux warrior who had originally joined the show as part of a group of prisoners of war turned over to Cody by the American War Office.

Long Wolf and his family stayed with the show and came back to England in 1892 but the Chief caught scarlet fever on this visit and died at the West London Hospital in Hammersmith. His doctor had the macabre name of Maitland Coffin. Long Wolf was buried with due ceremony in Brompton Cemetery.

The design on his headstone was based on a drawing he made on his deathbed for what he hoped would be a temporary resting place. He was right. Although he lay amongst strangers for a long time his remains were disinterred in 1996 and moved to a burial place in his ancestral lands.

The heyday of the first Exhibition was as brief as Cremorne’s. By 1914 the Wild West shows had departed, the Great Wheel was demolished and the grounds were being used as a camp for Belgian refugees. The new Exhibition was 20 years in the future. But we can still remember the days the Wild West came to West London.

This picture is of the Deadwood Stage. Now where did I put that Calamity Jane DVD?

The secret life of postcards

Picture postcards have been with us for more than a hundred years. People have been collecting them as well as sending them from the beginning. Before cameras became a common consumer item they were the only way many people could get a photograph of their street. Professional photographers it seemed roamed the streets of London taking pictures of any street they liked the look of, perhaps hoping to sell postcards to the residents. It’s possible anyway, all I know is that there are a lot of postcards of quite obscure streets taken from the 1890s to just before the First World War, Postcards like this one:

This is the view looking north down Pembridge Road from Notting Hill Gate. Most of these buildings are still there now, only the shops have changed. And the people of course.

Regular readers of the blog will know that I like a good close up. This is what I mean by the secret life of postcards. The photographer was trying to get a good picture of the street. The people in it were incidental for his purposes. But whether intentionally or by chance he captures the passers-by in unguarded moments. The girl waiting impatiently for her mother to finish taking to her friend. Or are they waiting to cross the road?

This is the Earls Court Road fully developed on the east side with a hoarding enclosing a vacant lot or building site on the other side.  There are plenty of people too.

In this case teenage girls hanging out by the shops? Two of them at least with sonewhere definite to go striding out of the picture.

A slightly less crowded scene. These mansion blocks on the western side of Elm Park Gardens have now been partially replaced by modern blocks of flats but the street is still recognizable.

In the close up the woman and her daughter are too blurred to see much detail but you can see her lifting up her skirt to protect it from the dirty surface of the road.

This is an excellent action view of Kensington Park Road looking north from the junction with Elgin Crescent. Look at the barely visible cyclist, the horses in motion and the woman leaning forward to start pushing the pram across the road. The close up adds a little information.

The woman in the foreground has noticed the camera, and maybe the man with the umbrella too. You can just about make out the child sitting up in the pram.

Maybe half a mile away, but possibly a few years apart, in Notting Hill Gate there is another bustling street scene.

You can see the Metropolitan underground station and another bus covered with adverts.

All the figures in this picture are interesting in some way, even the dog, but the two that catch my eye are the bearded man and his younger companion. Are they out for a leisurely stroll or pursuing some business venture?

Moving south here is a picture of the now demolished Kensington Crescent, an unsuccessful development in the Warwick Gardens area. The two children in the photograph are aware of the photographer perhaps even consciously posing for him.

I can’t tell if the expression is curious, resentful, bored or whether they’re just standing still as the photographer asked.

This picture shows numbers 1-14 Kensington Crescent. Normally I avoid fascinating facts but I cannot avoid telling you that Kenneth Grahame, author of the Wind in the Willows lived for five years at number 5, just before the photo was taken.

Finally a personal favourite, one of the first postcards I subjected to the scan and zoom process.

A good crisp view of Kensington Park Road showing St Peter’s Church. Try it on Google Maps street view for comparison. The pattern of the facade is still there exactly.

But naturally what I want to know is what the woman in the middle is doing with her left hand. Is she scratching her nose, and has this idle gesture been captured for posterity?

There are so many postcards full of compelling details and questions that we will probably be here again soon using the time machine to catch more of these details of everyday life.

Author’s message

From next week I’ll be tweeting a preview of the week’s post a couple of days before posting – assuming I know what I’ll be writing about before Wednesday. Follow me at @daveinlocal .

Gigantic: the Earl’s Court Wheel

If you’ve ever been to Vienna you might have seen the Wiener Riesenrad. Or if you’ve seen the film the Third Man you’ll remember Orson Welles famous speech: “in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”  which he delivers while he and Joseph Cotten are riding one of the compartments in the Riesenrad. Constructed in 1897 and miraculously still surviving despite wartime damage and attempts to demolish it the Riesenrad is one of the oldest examples of a Ferris Wheel. The original Ferris Wheel designed by a naval engineer called William Graydon was built for the Chicago Exhibition in 1893. (It was taken apart and reassembled twice in its lifetime the last being at the World’s Fair in St Louis, another film connection although it doesn’t appear in Take me to St Louis.) The European rights to the patent were acquired by Walter Bassett another ex-navy man who was the director of a UK engineering company. It was Bassett’s company that built the Riesenrad and other versions of the Ferris Wheel in Paris, Blackpool and of course Earl’s Court.

The Great Wheel (also called the Big Wheel and my favourite the Gigantic Wheel) was constructed at the Earls Court Exhibition.

The Exhibition grounds had been squeezed onto surplus railways lands west of Warwick Road. They opened in 1887. One of the first attractions was William Cody’s Buffalo Bill Rough Riders and Redskin Show. There were also “national” exhibitions – French, German and Italian – a concert hall and a switchback railway. The spectacles became increasingly ambitious under the new proprietor Imre Kiralfy who rebuilt most of the buildings on the site. It was he who brought in Walter Bassett to create the Earls Court Great Wheel. Construction began in 1894.

 Here is the Great Wheel going up:

The Wheel was open for passengers in July 1895. It was 300 feet in diameter weighed 1100 tons and was propelled by two steam engines. A complete revolution took about 20 minutes.

Here is the Wheel in action seen from the Exhibition grounds:

And here is the view from the railway:

The oddest views are the ones showing the Wheel towering above nearby streets such as this one:

The excitement generated by the Wheel seems to almost exactly like the feelings we had about the London Eye. There is something about the concept of riding high into the air in a closed compartment suddenly seeing the familiar city from a new angle which transcends the barriers of time which separate us from the pleasure seekers of the late 19^th century. The Wheel had its detractors who thought it “vulgar”, “foolish” or “insane”. So not much change there. It ran successfully for several years. (There was one incident when the Wheel got stuck for a few hours but the passengers were compensated and came away happy.)

Like many such attractions the Wheel had a limited lifespan. Bassett was brought back to demolish it in 1906-7.

Here it is going down:

The Earls Court exhibition site has been re-modelled and rebuilt several times since the demise of the Great Wheel and a new development is being planned at the moment.  But wouldn’t it be good if the Great Wheel had survived like the Riesenrad and the London Eye had a slightly battered older cousin waving at it from the west of London?