Brighton &amp; Hove Albion v Swindon, 1921 crowd

Brighton & Hove Albion v Swindon, 1921 crowd

Thursday 27 January 2011

There is something fascinating about looking at people. Sometimes it is fun to just sit on a bench on the sea front and watch people walk past. Without knowing them or where they are going, it is fun to guess what they are like and what they are going to do. People are very odd sometimes.

Using my time machine, I can go back to the football pitch just before the start of the match between Third Division South rivals Brighton & Hove Albion and Swindon Town. The league table for that year shows that Brighton finished fourth and Swindon ninth, but I have been unable to find out the result of the match. However, I'm not looking at the game, I'm looking at the people watching it . . . and a fascinating lot they are too!

I collect the photographs of the brothers Wiles of Hove. They visited Brighton matches to take photographs to sell to the fans after the game for 3d each (just over 1p in today's money). They would be shocked by the prices that have to be paid today for their work.

A young man in sailor's uniform is from the HMS Conqueror, launched in 1911, but sold for scrap just a year after this photograph was taken.

How many people can you see without a hat?

The original scan is shown below, together with the back which shows it to be on postcard paper.

From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

Because I've always felt a wonder at old photographs not easy to explain. Maybe I don't need to explain; maybe you'll recognize what I mean. I mean the sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you're seeing was once real. That light really did reflect into a lens from these lost faces and objects. That these people were really there once, smiling into a camera. You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can – what was just inside the door.

The wonder is even stronger with old stereoscopic views – the almost, but not quite, identical pair of photographs mounted side by side on stiff cardboard, that, looked at through the viewer, give a miraculous effect of depth. It's never been a mystery to me why the whole country was once crazy about them. Because the good ones, the really clear sharp photographs, are so real: Insert a view, slide it into focus, and the old scene leaps out at you, astonishingly three-dimensional. And then, for me, the awe becomes intense. Because now you really see the arrested moment, so actual it seems that if you watch intently, the life caught here must continue. That the raised horse's hoof so startlingly distinct in the foreground must move down to the solidness of pavement below it again; those carriage wheels revolve, the girl walk closer, the man move on out of the scene. The feeling that the tantalizing reality of the vanished moment might somehow be seized – that if you watch long enough you might detect that first nearly imperceptible movement – is the answer to the question Kate has asked me more than once: "How can you sit there so long – you hardly move! – staring endlessly at the very same picture?"

Time travel with old photographs

Brighton & Hove Albion v Swindon, 1921 crowd

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From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

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Time travel with old photographs

Brighton & Hove Albion v Swindon, 1921 crowd

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From "Time and Again" by Jack Finney (1970):

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