Forging Friendships: Sepia Saturday

The Sepia Saturday prompt photograph this week, features friends  c.1930 with one smiling and the others with rather serous expressions.   I have two  ideal matches for my theme of forging friends. 

 A photograph from the collection of my great aunt Jennie Danson.  Unfortunately it is not identified, but seems to date by the fashions to the late 1920s.  But why do they all look so glum?  

 

 

This photograph was taken in 1961 of my mother (second left) out with a group  of friends.  My mother would be in her 50s but the clothes now seem so old fashioned with three of the women wearing hats and clutching  their handbags - a far cry from today's casual style for  all ages.

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School Friendships

Our first friendships are probably forged at school - and here is my first class photograph from the 1950s.  I could still remember the names of the children I was friendly with - Jackie, Julia, Gail, Janice, Sandra, Miriam, Johnny and Keith.

 Devonshire Road Junior School, Blackpool, Lancashire c.1950. 

I am second from the right on the second row, with my hair tied in plaits with ribbons, next to the little boy kneeling in the striped pullover.

Work Friendships

 

Another photograph was in the collection left by my Great Aunt Jennie.  According to her daughter, it was a group   of Jennie's work colleagues at Poulton Post Office c.1918.  Certainly they seem to be dressed in a uniform of  the same skirts and blouses.  Jennie had written the names on the reverse  (how we wish all our ancestors would do that!) -  Gerty Roskell, Jennie Danson, Annie Jolly, Margaret Porter, Madge O' Rourke, Edith Jackson.

Another group, with the note on the  back "George's friends in Manchester".  believed to be work colleagues, all working  for the bookseller and newsagent W. H. Smith.  My great uncle George Danson is on the back row far right.   George was the youngest of eight  Danson brothers.  He was conscripted into the army in 1916 and a few months later was killed at the Battle of the Somme, a week after his 22nd birthday.  One cannot help wondering how many of his friends survived the war.

Friendship in the Armed Forces.

 The sense of camaraderie was very evident in the armed forces - as shown in these images.

A First World War photograph of my great  uncle Frank Danson, dressed formally here in his uniform and cap (front row left),  but what about those two fellows on the  back row in what appears to be their pyjamas and beanie hats.  Some kind of celebration? 

 

This photograph in the Danson family collection  was unfortunately unidentified, but I think Frank could be on the right of the front row.  He was wounded in action and hospitalized in Malta. Wounded soldiers, fit enough to go out and about, wore a distinctive uniform of blue flannel suits with white revers and a red tie.

 

On the left my aunt Peggy Danson and friend.  In World War Two she served in the WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force), with a note In the family photograph album that she was  in a Barrage Balloon Squadron in Hull, Yorkshire.  

 Balloon Barrages were a passive form of defence, designed to force enemy planes to fly higher and thus bomb much less accurately.  They were simply a bag of lighter-than-air gas attached to a steel cable anchored to the ground. The balloon could be raised or lowered to the desired altitude by a winch.  The work was not without its dangers, as the heavy steel cable could at tlmes snap, resulting in devastating injuries to the operator. 

A photograph from my husband's family collection with  this group of young sailors,  obviously relaxing!  The postcard franked 15th December 1909 from Beverley (Yorkshire?) was addressed to my husband's great grandmother, Mrs S. A. Hibbert, 169 Maxwell Street, South Shields, with the message:

Dear Mother, I write these lines hoping you are keeping well, and to ask if you can pick me out  in this group?  

Frustratingly there was no space left for a signature to be written.  But it must surely be Robert Hibbert who would be 15 in 1909?    To date I have not traced him in 1911 census - so more research called for here.  

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Friendship Through Fun

My father  is on the second row right  as vice captain of his school team at Broseley, Shropshire.  This is the earliest photograph (1926) I have of my father and the local historical society was instrumental in me getting a copy. 

 

On a generation to a similar photograph of my brother  in the hockey team of Broughton School, Edinburgh, in the 1960s

 

 My brother is front row - second left.

 

A happy group photograph of family and friends with my grandmother at the centre, with my mother, aunt and uncle on the right - but I never found out what the occasion this was.  c,1940s

 

And finally - friendship through making music together - here in a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Trial by Jury.  1970. 

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