Little black-and-white frozen moments of Whitby’s history
This is the daily blog of Alan Davidson who lives in Whitby North Yorkshire. My main hobby is search engine optimisation. I live in Bradford and also Whitby.
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Walking past what would be later in time The Magpie cafe in Whitby
I have been quite excited by my recent purchases on eBay; I started to buy some glass negatives approximately 100 years’ old couple of weeks back. The thing that makes them exciting is that they were all shot in Whitby, showing what appears to be a Victorian family enjoying their time in the streets and on the beach. I have been watching Whitby related items for the last four years and I’ve never come across any glass negatives like these wealthy Victorian in people holiday in the town, so they are not that common at all.
The lady that’s been selling these negatives on eBay told me that she bought a large collection of random glass negatives them at an auction and only when she look through them that you recognise that some of them were in Whitby.
It’s kind of a little bit fact-finding gold because if the negatives are places that are not recognisable they sell for small amounts of money and only if the place is popular and recognisable or has a particular ship car from the past does it then become more profitable when selling. The very first slide went up was snatched up by somebody for approximately £60 and on the same evening and next two negatives were won by someone using some automated bidding software in the last few seconds of the auction.
So by the time the fourth slide came up that evening I just slapped a £100 maximum bid down determined in the last few seconds to get at least one and I managed to get it for £88. Luckily as the last two weeks have gone by the Whitby negatives became a little less costly, so I haven’t had to pay quite as much for the other 10 negative slides I’ve bought.
Frank Sutcliffe is the famous photographer with a gallery in the town and he took some extremely fine photographs of Whitby and surrounding areas, but the thing is that the ones you see now are always shots of the local fishermen and working women of the town. Frank moved to Whitby because it was then a novelty to have holidays at the seaside for those few people were rich enough to be up to doing this, with the vast majority of people being very poor and working long hours and certainly not being able to afford holidays. But the time was that Frank made his money from the rich Victorian holidaymakers but the photographs you now see at what he took for his own interests of the local working people.
I have spent hours over the last couple of weeks trying to perfect the art of scanning the small three inches square glass negatives so that I could actually enlarge the images and reprint them on my large format printer keeping the quality still very sharp and good. It’s taken a lot of studying and practice but I’ve managed to now and reprint them on canvas and they look amazing, even though I say so myself.
I find it rather strange when you can look at this moment in time that throws and from 100 years ago and look into the eyes of the people and see and recognise the buildings in the background that are still there today 100 years later. I have one particular photograph which was taken at a distance across to the East side of Whitby
A glass negative of Victorians on Whitby beech
from the Westcliffe and this one was on a larger glass slide about 8 inches in diameter, the strange thing was that when I scanned it at very high-resolution I could actually see a row of little ragamuffin children standing on the cliff watching the photographer. In fact when you scan them very carefully high-resolution, you get amazing detail that you wouldn’t have seen and it’s a like peering back into the past at that moment in time frozen when the world was a very different place..
I will be putting these old the sale on www.whitby-art.co.uk although to be perfectly honest when I first started the Whitby Art website, I was getting orders in but was getting quite angry when orders actually arrived.
The reason is that when I worked out the amount of time it took to print and put together the box canvas and then the postage and packing I wasn’t making enough profit margin when I was compare my pricings to places like eBay. Anyway I have increasing the prices sufficiently to reduce the orders but to make them worthwhile when they do come in.
I think there a little special these frozen moments of Whitby’s history and I’ll enjoy doing them. And if I don’t get many orders I’ll still be happy because my home and my Whitby holiday cottages and I will be enjoying the fruits of my labour.
If you’re interested keep an eye on my website and I will be putting up the other little chunks of history very soon.
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