My 1970s Images

I have realised that next year - 2020 - I will have been taking photographs for half a century.

I started in late 1970, after persuading my mother to buy a Kodak Instamatic Camera from an offer on the back of a Rice Krispies packet. I cannot remember how much this bargain cost us, but, aged eight or just nine, I was elated when it arrived.

I can't recall much about taking the pictures but I do remember getting them processed at Boots and, especially, the excitement of picking them up, tearing open the packaging, desperately eager to see the fruits of my labour.

The Kodak Instamatic 25 wasn't a sophisticated camera range, and I believe that mine, the Instamatic 25, was the cheapest and simplest of the lot.

It boasted fixed aperture and fixed focusing. But I understand that there were two shutter speeds, indicated by a sun symbol (1/90th second) and a half-sun symbol (1/40th second).

The Instamatic 25 took 126 "Kodapak" film cartridges which, I guess, must have all have been the same speed. Certainly, there was no ASA/ISO setting. It was not fast film, maybe 100 ASA or even slower.

There was no other camera or photographer in the family, so my pictures of us are unique, excepting a few professional or school photographs.

I embarked on photography with childish enthusiasm but no skill or knowledge.

However, from the start, I made an effort to pose my subjects, such as my younger brother Nic on his bicycle, or one of the Bullpit boys from down the lane posing on his bike in front of his front door.

At first, everything was taken in black and white. In those days, black and white photography was still cheaper to do than colour photography, which was considered quite extravagant.

Cataloguing my images recently, I realised that I have very few prints left.

I wonder what happened to them. I don't currently have a negative scanner. I also took quite a lot of colour slides, which are pretty good, but, again, I cannot scan at the moment. I loved them particularly because the cost of processing was included in the price of the film.

Looking back, the 1970s was an innocent time. When I started taking pictures, we lived at 15 Hurst Lane, Cumnor, Oxfordshire.

The lane was more like a track in those days, without tarmac. My brothers and I spent a lot of time playing in the field and shrubbery - 'The Passages' - the other side of the lane from the bungalow.

They were strange times. I recall coming home from school one day to find the lane sealed off by police officers. A farmer had been shot dead by a burglar, an event so rare that it was reported on the national BBC Nine O'Clock News.

My brothers and I attended Cumnor Village School where they had gathered us into the hall to watch on television Charles invested as Prince of Wales, at Caernarfon Castle, Wales, now half a century ago.

On the school photograph above, I believe I am the boy bottom second from the left.

At home, the house was small - we three brothers shared the same bedroom, but the garden was large.

Our Dad, Robin Wilson who sadly died in 2015, was a vegetable gardener. I recall being fascinated by watching him digging - and the sheer size of the carrots coming out of the ground. To this day on my allotment, I have never managed to grow carrots of that size.

Considering my age, lack of photographic experience and very basic camera, some of these photos are not bad.

Although, of course, some of them were pretty bad!

When I took this picture of the Bullpit brothers, I clearly didn't notice that a branch was in front of one of the boys' face.

Incidentally, the elder Bullpit, Christopher, is carrying a camera. It looks like a Kodak Brownie.

I wonder what became of the Bullpits. They would be in their late fifties now.

I also often think of my Cumnor Village School pal Basil Harris, although I cannot find any print or negative with his image on. Perhaps, we were only friends before I owned the camera.

Basil was the son of an academic who had a large house at the bottom of Cumnor Hill. I suspect he does not even remember "Chris Wilson", as I was known then, but if he does, it would be lovely to hear from him.


At home in those days, something as simple as putting up a little tent in the garden seemed like an adventure.

A young family, without a lot of money, we made the most of our surroundings, enjoyed the open countryside and the things that life brought us for little or nothing.

I am unsure about how happy these days were, though. I certainly enjoyed the freedom of living in the Oxfordshire countryside, but, being quite dyslexic, I was a misundertsood and troubled child who spent a lot of time at school in tears.

My memories of the decade are very patchy, and often the recollections that come to mind are not the happiest ones.

I never seemed to get my act together. I remember telling my mother late one night that there was a school trip the following day for which I would need sandwiches, precipitating a dreadful panic because there was no bread in the house and it needed to be borrowed from the neighbours.
On another occasion, I was very upset because of my desire to enter a wild flowers competition and our subsequent collective failure to find any wild flowers!

Worse still, I remember being told off by my mum for misbehaving at my birthday party, trying to shoot all the guests with a toy gun.

In 1971, we moved from Oxfordshire to Dorset. Dad had got a new job with Southern Gas and we relocated to 6 Charborough Road, Broadstone, Poole.

The house was much larger than the Cumnor one and the garden also a good size. Houses were far more affordable in those days.

My interest in photography continued. I went on taking picutres with the Kodak 25, not graduating to a Halina camera, bought with Green Shield Stamps, until the age of 14.

My brothers were still my primary subjects, although occasionally Mum would use the camera to take a group shot of the four of us (as in the one below taken in the 6 Charborough Road garden).

In colour, I started taking shore and sea scenes at Sandbanks and Brownsea Island, which I may scan when I have the equipment, and show at a later date.

Generally, I became more interested in photography of inanimate objects - to the puzzlement of family and friends.

I don't know why this is. Even now, I find myself drawn to taking landscapes, seascapes and pictures of buildings. Anything without people in!

We lived at one end of Charborough Road and at the end was the Recreation Ground a.k.a. "The Rec", which bordered Canford Heath.

I liked nothing more than heading off on my little bicycle to take some black-and-white, somewhat out-of-focus pictures of heathland!

For some reason, the pines, the heather, the rhodedendra appeared exotic to me.

Once I saw an adder, but I failed to capture it on film, possibly because I was running away.

In truth, I think I spent much of my time alone. I did not have a lot of friends as a child growing up in Broadstone.


When I eventually reached Poole Grammar School, I started printing up my black-and-white pictures in the school darkroom.

I would take a photo a seaside bench, perceiving great beauty in its deteriorating paintwork.

I have gone through all my 1970s pictures, categorising them and pressing labels onto the Boots wallets and Kodak slide boxes that the negatives or transparencies are kept in.

I'm not sure if I have memories of what is pictured from having looked at the photographs in years and decades past or from my original recollections of those times, if you get my drift.

A statistical analysis indicates that from 1970 to 1979, I took 34 films (they were all purchased from meagre pocket money) with a total of 525 images.

To my surprise, just 11 of the films were black and white. The colour ones will have to wait for another day!

Memories of Dad: Walter Robin Balmer Wilson 1932 - 2015

Two weeks ago, on Tuesday, 25 August 2015, the funeral of my father, Robin Wilson, took place at the Oratory Church of St Aloysius, Oxford, followed by burial at St Michael's Churchyard, Cumnor. Dad had died on Thursday, 13 August, aged 82.

Looking back on his life, I am struck by his great gentleness and kindness. He was a loving father, a quiet and scholarly man who enjoyed being at home with his family. He relaxed by reading about history, language and religion, making copious notes in his beautiful handwriting. He also loved working in the vegetable garden, growing food for our dinners.

My early memories of Dad are from when we lived in Aylesbury and then in Oxfordshire in the mid to late-1960s. I remember the excitement of receiving a big tricycle that he and Mum gave me one Christmas in Aylesbury - and my grandfather - Dad's Dad - visiting and giving me a helpful push on it.

When we moved to Cumnor in Oxfordshire in the late 1960s, I recall the time Dad spent with me and my brothers in the garden. When I obtained my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, he was very happy to pose for me. I recall him, showing me his vegetable plot and pulling out a huge carrot destined for Mum's delicious winter stew.

Dad taught me how to use a bow and arrow - the arrows had a rubber suction pad at their end to limit the damage they could do. He also erected a little round, metal-sided swimming pool to splash around in. We were in heaven! I would shoot arrows at it which would stick on the side.

We also played in a tiny tent which he had erected for us, and Dad took my elder brother and me blackberrying on our bicycles. One night we rode back as the sun was setting, our bags bulging with berries. I can rarely recall a happier day.

Dad had an interesting background. His father had worked as an oil company executive while embarking on his own enterprises, buying a petrol station and dreaming of launching a greyhound track in Chester, to my grandmother's horror.

Dad was quite different - studious rather than entrepreneurial, working hard at Worcester Grammar School and being offered a place to read history at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, a.k.a. Teddy Hall.

By all accounts he was a very serious young man with a great interest in Roman Catholicism to which he had converted from Anglicanism.

He found he had a vocation to the priesthood, and, rather than taking his place at Teddy Hall, began his Oxford studies instead at the Jesuit college, Campion Hall, where he read Classics.

The direction of his life changed again after he started corresponding with a girl he had met on a train in Germany. It led to romance and a decision to marry rather than enter formation for the Catholic priesthood.

After graduating from Oxford University, Dad had to do national service in Germany. With the passing years, his time in The Army was viewed through rose-tinted glasses.

Although I am assured he was not at all keen on the military life at the time, afterwards he liked to talk with enthusiasm about his service as a general's chauffeur, and particularly the stark contrast between his dignified and sober boss and a hard-drinking, boisterous American general who was the life and soul of the party whenever he rolled up in his Jeep.

My parents married in my mother's home town, Bremen, in northern Germany, and he and Mum moved to Derby where he embarked on a career with British Gas.

He started as a management trainee, a role he said came with a company bicycle, which, at first as least, he kept in their bedroom - to ensure it remained pristine.

Dad became a commercial sales manager, working in gas board jobs in Scunthorpe, where I was born, Aylesbury, Oxford and Poole in Dorset.

In Poole, he would shift his working day forward in the summer months to try to come home early to take us to the glorious beach at Sandbanks in the family motor, a formidable Morris Oxford.

We enjoyed many happy times at the beach, jumping the waves, crashing through the white water, and having sprints along the sands. Although not as tall as his sons, Dad had a real turn of speed over 100 yards.

I have vivid memories of life with him in Broadstone, Poole.

Looking back, he was a remarkably tolerant father in many ways, although his natural cautiousness, particularly about road safety, meant we were strongly discouraged from riding bicycles on the roads until we were in the sixth form.

In his own way he always tried his best for us.

When I failed my 11+ exam and was sent to Poole's secondary modern school, I was very unhappy. He and Mum moved heaven and earth to help get me transferred after one just term to Poole Grammar School. When we received notification of my transfer, a riotous night of celebration and barley wine drinking ensued at our home in Charborough Road.

Dad had his own philosophy. He did not generally believe in over-exerting himself. His words of wisdom to us included: "Burst not thy boiler!", "Throttle right back", and "I do what I can, I can no more."

However, at times he worked incredibly hard, on projects such as digging a very deep trench in the front garden to try to divert an underground stream which had been flooding my bedroom (our house was built on the side of a steep hill) and converting, decorating and insulating our new house when he and Mum moved from Poole back to Oxfordshire.

He was a proud grandfather and was delighted when his first granddaughter was born in 1990.

When she was a toddler, he would her horsey rides on his back. And he also loved his four other granddaughters.

There was a serious side to Dad but also a fun and mischievous side. He enjoyed a good gossip about politics and was not averse to stirring things up a bit.

For years he was nicknamed "Gwalt" - from Gwalterus, the Latin for his first name Walter, which we had espied on his graduation certificate - and, somehow, the name became synonymous with naughtiness.

Sometimes, he would march far ahead of us in the street in Oxford, gradually disappearing from sight, or join a passing religious procession, vanishing into a college chapel for Evensong!

For his amusement, he compiled his own Anglo-Saxon dictionary, free of words of Latin and Greek derivation, and some of them his vocabulary. Sometimes he would correct me when I said "telephone" or "horizon", substituting his preferred words "farspeaker" and "skyline"!

He loved to watch his granddaughters playing when they were little.

 One of my favourite photographs is of Dad and his granddaughter Emily on playground swings.

Life with Dad was full of surprises. He did not like travelling through London, even on public transport, so once when we embarked on our annual holiday, he hired a couple of Jaguar limousines to bypass the Metropolis.

On the other hand, journeys in the Morris Oxford could be very long and demanding.

The joy of seeing the sea at Weymouth after a seemingly interminable drive from Oxford was immense.


And, later, on trips from Poole to Oxford, we were offered a round of ice creams for every minute the Morris Oxford brought us late to the 9.30am mass at Blackfriars.

So many ice creams were won by me and my brothers; most of them, of course, never materialised!

On motorway, 50mph was considered a great velocity in the Morris Oxford. Generally, 'A' roads were preferred.

Dad could be anxious, especially when we were learning to drive, but there was a more general peacefulness about him.

He loved the outdoors, whether among his apple trees, playing garden cricket or going the dreaded Sunday "run in the Cotswolds" - a lengthy car excursion.

I regret that during periods of my life I did not see as much of him as I might have done, although in recent years I have visited a lot.

His disease, Alzheimer's, was very gradual at first, but became much more severe in recent years and, particularly, this year at Freeland House, Oxfordshire, where the carers and nursing staff were wonderful.

Dad was a regular at Blackfriars, Oxford, for decades. He and mum had attended their 9.30am mass from the days when Geoffrey Preston OP and Malcolm McMahon OP were part of the community there.

Dad also enjoyed the tradition of the Oxford Oratory, St Aloysius Gonzaga, with his Latin mass.

So, in a way it was fortuitous that a ceiling issue had put Blackfriars' church out of action, so the Prior John O'Connor celebrating Dad's Requiem Mass instead up the road at St Aloysius.

He would have loved the hymns, favourites such as Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation, and Tell Out My Soul, the Greatness of the Lord, and the stirring organ music.

Dad loved playing the organ and was such a fan of J S Bach (1685 - 1750) that he has taken Johann Sebastian as baptism names when he entered the Roman Catholic faith.

Fr. John spoke very well about Dad, taking our stories about him and perfectly capturing his unusual amalgam of gentleness, faith, eccentricity and humour.

Dad would often leave a church service with the jaunty remark: "A useful little mass!"

This was his final mass. Afterwards, the funeral cortege drove up to Cumnor where he was laid to rest beside the village church, St. Michael's, as the heavens wept.

It is hard to get used to life without him. It feels there is a big void. We are left with happy memories and golden photographs of Dad, some of which I share here.

Early Autumn in Brighton and Hove

Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you got to do is call
And I'll be there
Yes I will
You've got a friend

Carole King


Early Autumn is always a favourite time of year for me - the cusp betwixt Summer and Autumn proper when one enjoys the best of both seasons.

This year, it seems to have been particularly wonderful in Brighton and Hove, possibly because I am at home, rather than away 12 hours to 14 hours every working day on a London commute.

Indeed, I have been at home for some five months now and have not missed going into the Smoke one jot. I feel a lot closer to nature.

In the mornings, I try to go for a cycle ride along the seafront before starting my day's endeavour. I never tired of the skyscape and seascape. It is different every day and often spectacular.

I work long hours at my desk at home and, in truth, it is a struggle. When you try to find work, you realise the UK is not out of the woods of recession yet.

However, I am spurred on by the card on my wall - "A winner is just a loser who tried one more time" - and the overall improvement in my lifestyle.

Sadly, though, I have had to give up lunchtime basketball.

My knees have become a real issue and for months have woken me up at night with searing pain. The basketball - a hard contact sport - made it much worse, so now instead I cycle every day, which makes it better, and take some painkillers and sleeping pills. I hope I will not need an operation.

It is funny the things you see while cycling around, such as a little doggy at the steering wheel of a car.

My new life has allowed me to do a lot of thinking.

I want a sustainable way of working which cannot just end at any moment.

I want to be able to do work I am proud of and which I enjoy.

I want to do the sort of work my kids would be proud of.

Life may be a bunch of compromises but there comes a time when you have to put your health and sanity first.

Therefore, I have to be very careful about my next move.

It is always interesting to see people's reactions when your situation and supposed status suddenly changes for the worse.

True friends are solid and there for you; most people, however, are not seen for dust, not wanting to be infected by whatever has felled you. In this parlous and fickle world, I don't suppose one can blame them for putting self-interest first.

My partner, Laura, has been a great comfort as has Mr Cheeky.

He has become a local character in his manor, the four streets near our home.

Mr Cheeky and his dear friend Django spend a good deal of time in the local pub, entertaining the regulars.

He also likes to have a good sleep on the pub mantelpiece.

One of the regulars told me a funny story about Mr Cheeky. He said that his bedroom is on the top floor of his house and that he first made Mr Cheeky's acquaintance when he slept in one morning and awoke to find Mr Cheeky sleeping on his chest.

Mr Cheeky had apparently somehow got onto the roof of his house, jumped down onto his balcony and climbed in through the open window, before settling down for a kip on top of him.

Now he regularly enjoys tuna at his house!

Another local I also did not know came up to me in the street that said that Mr Cheeky often visited her and her small children at their home. "They absolutely adore him," she purred.

Mr Cheeky seems to have an enormous appetite and gallops everywhere, like a tiny racehorse.

He has put on some weight and matured, making more effort to avoid moving cars and generally look after his health better.

Mr Cheeky and I put a certain effort into campaigning (online) for a No vote in Scotland - to keep the Union together.

He took the name, Mr McCheeky Wilson, for the period of the campaign, producing his own manifesto to persuade wavering Scots. I like to think we did our little bit for the United Kingdom.

The McCheekster has developed a desire to go on trips in Laura's car, jumping when the window is open and making himself comfortable, sometimes falling asleep.

I was almost late for an interview the other day because of having difficulty getting him out of the back of the car.

We go to see my dad and mum every fortnight.

To be frank, Dad's condition is not good. His memory is very poor now. Real confusion has set in.

All the same, I enjoy our trips to see him and Mum. They are coping well, despite all.

My brothers also visit regularly so that there is one of us there every weekend.

Nic comes over from Ireland as often as he can and it is always good to see him.

He and his wife have taken on a dog, like their late daughter Emily always wanted.

Life is a strange, hard-to-tame beast.

You can only make the most of the cards you are dealt.

The year will go into free fall: Hallowe'en, Bonfire, Christmas, New Year, the misery of January to March. It could be tough.

I heard from my old friend, Midders, the other day. He says he has a serious health scare (the usual one), so I am hoping and praying he gets through it.

The other day, I saw a very good poster on social media. It read: "Never let the sadness of my past and the fear of your future ruin the happiness of your present". Another one for the wall, methinks. Every moment is precious and sacred.

One piece of great news is that the Battle of Hove Park was won!

The political animal of a head teacher switched sides at the last minute in, my considered view, to save his own skin.

Hove Park School will not become a wretched Academy!

We were invited to a joyous victory celebration at comrades Natasha and Mark Steel's home.

It was great! We oldies chatted outside while the kids danced to Freebird and Let's Dance inside.

I was very impressed that the kids of today know these great classics of my era.

My moderate drinking regime is going very well. It is now 38 weeks since I last drank too much or had a hangover. Now I am in the groove, I am a truly committed moderate drinker.

Well, that's about it for now.

It is almost my bedtime. I will do the dishes, read a bit of my Saint novel (excellent bedtime reading) and get an early night.

I am off to Oxford bright and early tomorrow morning.

I just hope Mr Cheeky does not sneak into the car.