Windows on Life : Sepia Saturday

This week's Sepia Saturday prompt photograph shows a young girl posing in front of a window. - and I have the ideal match!

Posed  in front of her home (and business),  

my cousin's mother Elsie Oldham (1906-1989) of Blackpool, Lancashire.

From the house above,  the Oldham family ran a long establish carters and coal merchant business, with stabling for the horses behind the house. 

The enterprising Elsie around 1926 set up  her hairdressing  salon there with adverts on the house promoting "bobbing, shingling and marcel waves" prominent displayed. 

I love this 1920s evocative blotter presenting a more elegant side of her business - under the name of  "Elise  -  perhaps the French adaptation of the more mundane Elsie  was regarded as more appropriate for a hairdresser.

On the death in 1939 of her father John William Oldham,  Elsie   took on the helm of the coal merchant business along with her husband Arthur Stuart Smith, seeing it  through the difficult wartime years, and  combining it with her own hairdressing activities. The coal merchant business was eventually sold around  1948  to another local firm, thus ending three generations of the family concern. 

************  

Against the window,  a special photograph of my grandfather and grandmother  - William Danson and Alice English, taken c.1916 when Grandad was setting  out for war. I never knew my grandmother as she died when I was a baby and this is the only photograph I have of William and Alice together.   

Alice has featured  several times on my blog as she is my major brick wall.  I have never been able to trace her  birth certificate, c.1884  to find out the name of her mother and her early life remains a mystery which I doubt if I will ever now solve. 

My dressmaker mother, Kathleen Danson,
modelling one of her dresses. c.1930

My father setting off for war with my mother right, 
and my aunt Edith  left, c.1941

Here I am with my mother who I can only remember with grey hair. I can't remember having the kitten either!   Nowadays I think we would move that dustbin out of the way before taking a photograph! 

 

Below the same window.

 

My mother and I again in unmistakably 1970s colourful fashion. 

.

***************

 I am snap-happy when it comes to photographing windows on holiday, so here I am adding images that takes me back to many happy times. 

Where 16th century  French architecture meets the contemporary style of the famous glass Louvre Pyramid. Opened in 1989,  it evoked controversy on many grounds. It now provides the entrance to the Louvre Museum, and somehow I think it works. 

Against the backcloth of a classical building,  a cow "marches" on parade atop of a bus shelter in Warsaw.  The  full scale  fibre  glass figures are  decorated  by local artists and represent different aspects of city life and culture.  

 The "Cow Parades" have become a popular feature of public art  in cities across the world, adding colour and interest to the surroundings. 

 

 An unusual corner window in the spa town of Bad Reichenhall in Bavaria. 

A magnificent frontage to a  building  in Traustein in Bavaria, Germany.

A rustic, homely look to these attractive  little windows in Austria.


 

Celebrating Halloween  - A window display in our hotel in Falmouth, Massachusetts  on a New England visit. 

It is not just abroad you will find colourful window boxes   Just three miles from my home in the Scottish Borders is this hotel in Melrose.   First impressions do count!  

As for someone peeping out through a  window, I had to turn to this picture  of my little granddaughter. 

***********

Sepia Saturday gives bloggers an opportunity

to share their family history through photograph

 

Click HERE to read how other Sepia Saturday bloggers 

have reflected this week's prompt photograp.