Sepia Saturday: Braving the Traffic Across the World

Each week, Sepia Saturday, provides an opportunity for genealogy bloggers to share their family history through photographs.

This week's prompt focuses on street crowds and horse drawn traffic. 

Travel from one of Europe's most famous cities,  to a Far East waterfront, and   a small country town in Lancashire to experience some  busy traffic.

 

 I can't see any horses here, but a busy scene in the Square outside Paris Opera House, May 1940 - a photograph from my father's war-time album.

 The Bund, Shanghai, China, c.1939.
By the early 20th century,  this was a major financial centre for East Asia.
Another "service" memento,  this time from my husband's uncle, Matthew Iley White 
who served in the Durham Light Infantry in China. 1937-40.  

Mattie's Service Book showing his time in China

 Waiting for the Bus at Poulton Market Square, Lancashire - early 20th century. 

Not a very good photograph, but the man on the left in the peak cap  standing by the open topped bus in the Market Square is my great uncle Bob Danson,  a postman in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire,  I don't know if I would feel all that safe on the top of this vehicle, ready to take passengers into Blackpool.

I was pleased to see  that the British Postal Service Appointment Books had been made available on www.ancestry.co.uk.    It is always fascinating to see an original record relating to an ancestor, but  to be honest they gave little information besides recording Bob's  name and appointment in  1907 in Preston as a Rural Postman,  with a further entry showing  his appointment  as postman in Blackpool in May 1925.  

His daughter Irene  presents a much more colourful picture of Bob's working life and recollects that:

"He went a long way on his bicycle from Poulton over Shard Bridge [where his grandfather Henry Danson had been a toll keeper] to deliver the post over Wyre.  He had a little hut at Presall where he had to wait until it was time to do the collections and then ride all the way back to Poulton.

In later years he worked from Blackpool General Post Office where his round was North Promenade and the Cliffs - very windy, but it seems the hotel people looked after him with cups of tea now and again. 

He was told at the oubreak of the First World War when his five brothers were joining the army, that he had a bad heart.   But work must have kept him fit, as he lived to be 89 years old and died in 1970."

Horse drawn traffic of a different kind: 

One of the many beautiful wall paintings you see in Austria

A carter in Newcastleton, Roxburghsire in the Scottish Borders. 

From the postcard collection at the Heritage Hub, Hawick.

How many of us have carter ancestors?  This was the occupation of my great great grandfather Robert Rawcliffe of Hambleton, near Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire.  

A horse drawn charabanc for getting around Krakow in Poland, 2007

And finally  - my daughter enjoying a quiet donkey ride in the park 1974

Click HERE  to find  out how other bloggers have braved the traffic 

with this week's theme