Since he makes such great use of photo archives I thought that Tom, especially, might find these pictures interesting. I came across them by googling “British Library Catalogue of Photographs”. Apparently they’ve got 350,000 and they waited until 2009 to have their first exhibition, in which these five appeared. They led me to Curated, which as far as I can tell is a photography magazine, I’m going to look at it again later when I’ve got more time.
I won’t repeat what the two articles say about the photos.
All right, I will a bit. The hippo’s called Obaysch – not very African-sounding, perhaps he or she was captured by Germans – and the photograph was taken in 1852 by Don Juan Carlos, Duke of Montizón.
This one reminds me of The Walrus & The Carpenter:
Here’s a giant parrot perched on a chimney. Is the blurry part a backdrop? They can’t have had photo backdrops in them days. The men are very sharp, though.
What are these women checking, boxes of chocolates? Whatever it is required natural light and (I think) open air. Anyway, I like the room.
This one below is my favourite picture. They look like tiny men inside a motor car engine, or perhaps the one at the bottom with a pickaxe strikes the bell of a clock on the hour. Could they be digging a tunnel?
Update: Thanks to MMcM, we now know they’re digging the tunnel for the Central Line. I’ve made the print a bit clearer and one thing I notice is that, of the 23 men in the picture, every single one has a moustache.
A Bad Guide 
At your [Curated] link I find this sentence: “Some choice images of industry after the jump.” What does “jump” mean here ? Is “industry after the jump” an inelegant journalistic variation on “after the start of the industrial revolution” ?
Stu, I was hoping you were going to tell us something about the name “Obaysch”. Jump refers to jump leads, jump cables, a new game for hedonistic young people.
Thank you, Artur!
One pants — though not so noticeably as ST Coleridge, who once produced the immortal enjambment “I breathed/in pants” — at the opportunity to burrow into these cavernous files, and never again emerge.
(Actually, I’ve made intermittent attempts to do so, but things have so far seemed always to be “in construction”.)
The “jump” means “the rapid industrialization”. Inelegant but plain. There’s journalism for you. Where would we be without it, in this case.
Artur, I would take that mysterious works to be some sort of immense oven or mill, though someone said “underground”.
As to those young ladies in the very white skirts upon the strand (Brighton perhaps?), someone remarked, “that’s a lot of laundry”.
Most relaxed looking zoo hippo I have seen (though someone says “sleeping” is not the same as “relaxed”.)
It looked a bit as though the women in the factory were handling type, though with clean hands and aprons — no. Chocolates, confirms someone.
To be fair, no-one’s kissing in those photos.
Absolutely no need to start being fair, but what has kissing got to do with it?
Talking of pants, my trousers split down the middle in the back yesterday, I think it’s because I’m too fat for them. By good luck my underwear was the same colour, but my daughter was still embarrassed when we went shopping. The older I get the less I give a damn about things like this, but I suppose I have to think of the feelings of others. I’m throwing the trousers away probably, I haven’t decided.
When I was … fifteen, I think, and a scout, I used to wear really shabby, old denim trousers on hikes (I saw that as the only sensible thing to do in a world increasingly populated by Gore-tex clad equipment fanatics). When worn to pieces they split horizontally below both back-pockets. Once, on one of those hikes, my underwear was far from the same colour, and when we were embarking on the bus back home some Gore-texan said “Your nickers are brown!”. “I know. They’ve turned out like that.”, I replied. He shut up.
I remember my jeans used to split there too.
The urban fashion style among the pre-adolescent set hereabouts is to wear your extremely baggy jeans so low upon your hips as to show off an extremely generous sample of your underwear.
Nobody would mistake me for a pre-adolescent.
Hah, I completely forgot the word ‘jeans’.
Tom, that “underwear” is part of the jeans.
I’m all for that now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t fashion. Much more enticing than an Ingresque expanse of naked, sagging flesh on a sofa.
“After the jump,” in blogging lingo, means the part of the post that you can only see on the page for the post itself (as opposed to the main page of the blog which shows multiple posts.)
I would like to believe that the beach scene is at Lyme Regis, and that the stairway visible along the wall in the distance is where Louisa Musgrove fell and hurt herself in Persuasion.
Oh, and the whole point of telling that story was to set up “That shit chat shut him up!” I really shouldn’t write comments when Euro qualifiers are about to start.
With Google Earth et al. around, we might actually find out exactly where that picture was taken. Those two cliffs in the background reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of Hastings. That’s probably because it’s the only English south coast town I’ve seen from that angle.
“To be fair” probably reflects the fact that I’m being denied my weekly dose of highlights from the English Premier League. Football men preface their answers with “to be fair”. “To be fair, Brian” they whine “we go’ the free points an’ tha’s all tha’ ma’ers. Now we go’a get the job done on Wednesday at the Emira’es an’ ge’a resul’. ” Except the foreign ones, of course, some of whom speak pretty good English.
Well, it’s a nice thought. I’d say it’s a bit too big for Lyme Regis, more like Brighton, but I’m not sure Brighton has the cliffs on the right-hand side. Also there’s the weird, gabled triumphal arch spanning the promenade on the left. I wonder if it’s Dover, I’ve never been there.
Damn, Trond beat me to it.
Dearie, your footballer reminds me of the pictures of David Beckham’s new hairdo. I think he looks rather good, I’ll have to find them for you…
Here it is. He looks so intelligent in specs.
Here‘s Hastings from the pier. The old photo would have been taken before it was built, somewhere behind us and closer to the shore. The cliffs in the background do have the same shape, don’t they? That would be the East Cliff, I think.
F, the other expression for that is “below the fold”, isn’t it?
…For some reason, if you google Folkestone Harbour, you get up dozens of photos of Tracy Emin. What’s that all about?
I think that gap in the middle of the skyline is Warrior’s Square. If you use Google Streetview and take a look eastwards from where London Road meets the Grand Parade, they seem to match window by window. The arch could have been marking the entrance to the Grand Parade; it seems to be situated where today the name of the seafront street changes to Marina.
I must admit it does look pretty similar. However, I can’t see the Lotus Chinese Restaurant in the earlier picture.
If I’m right, i.e. if my usual monomaniac wishful thinking happened to be spot on, put that down to sheer luck. Just the other day we almost rented a place in Old Hastings for a week this summer.
But that Chinese restaurant is hard to explain away. Obviously the Chinese were there first.
Hastings is a lot nicer than I’d thought. I love the tiny Queen Victoria standing on an enormous pedestal and looking out to sea in Warrior Square (what a name).
Ah ha, you’ve been to Hastings! Does it have a pebble beach, like the early photo? And why all the military associations? England lost the Battle of Hastings, after all (though few Englishman would put it quite that way).
Trond, I’m sure you’re right. There are too many similarities (like the bend in the seawall to the left of the triumphal arch, and the blank windows above it). You win a lifetime’s supply of something-or-other very cheap, like snow.
No , I’ve never been there, but I had a peek before deciding to go there this (coming) summer. The pair of cliffs in the background seemed very similar.
The beach looks sandy today, but I think the sand must be imported.
I’ve tried to put women on a pedestal, but they just won’t let us do that to them anymore. To Queen Victoria, it’s probably a way to keep a watching eye on the immoralities waiting to happen between the groins.
Before deciding not to go there, eventually. We’re ending up in North Wales, apparently.
first of all: AJP ¡you should never do such embarrassing things to your daughter! Never, never! But you’re lucky, all my last jeans split down in the same place… they all want to tell me something about my hips in a very unpolite manner, I think. I hate them.
What are those women doing? Sorting chocolates said Tom? This photo is the most mysterious.
Like tom clark said, they’re digging the Central Line.
Those women are printing photographs.
I want to make sure I understand this splitting image. Trond wrote that his jeans split horizontally. Julia wrote that hers “split down”, which I take to mean vertically.
Mine, though, wear through just below the crotch-roads, on the inside of the left leg, and then tear due to this wear (thus the expression “wear and tear”). Now quite apart from whether I might be slim-hipped, these different kinds of fabric distress suggest that broad beams are not necessarily the cause of jeans failure.
After much study, I have concluded instead that the activities in which a person engages determine where the jeans split. When riding a bicycle, you slide forward and backward on the bicycle seat, which translates into an up and down motion over the seat of your jeans, thus encouraging horizontal failure. When wearing high-heels, your rear-end waggles to the right and left, thus encouraging vertical failure.
In my case, the wear seems to be due to my habit of straddling things I sit on, thus pulling on the fabric around the crotch. Apparently I straddle with a list to the right, which pulls more on the inside of the left leg.
I didn’t describe the high-heel mechanism well. What happens is that the right and left buttocks churn against each other up and down in contrary motion, thus pulling on the seam between them.
It was in my teens and early twenties that my jeans used to split horizontally. Nowadays they are worn like yours.
But since I cycle just as much now as I did then, I’ve been thinking that the wear is caused by friction between my no longer adolescent thighs and the seat. Back then my jeans were worn out by restlessly sliding back and forth on wooden classroom chairs.
MMcM, thank you very much for revealing the story of the pictures and for opening the British Library archives for us. I would say more, but Stu has said I mustn’t gush.
Julia, how was I lucky when my trousers split?
I wasn’t trying to embarrass her, but the split was behind me, so I kind of forgot about it.
My jeans have split on my right cheek, and the evidence points (except literally) to the problem being that I keep my wallet in that hip pocket. It’s a pity – they are a handsome pair of navy blue cord jeans. My old cord jeans were a colour I called “autumn hue” and my wife called “that appalling traffic light amber”. And I had two pairs of those.
Ahh! That’s what they’re doing! Thank you, MMcM! Is wonderful, I could have never thought those women were doing that. I imagine they didn’t have to work on cloudy days.
The jeans problem: What happened is that I said it wrong (just copied the “split down” that had been mentioned before). The truth is that my last two pairs of jeans were broken horizontally below one of the back pockets, exhausted from my hips. And I do not use tight jeans. They’re just being mean.
AJP I know you did not do that on purpose, but you could have looked for ways to solve it (or cover it). I’m with Alma at this!
They sound lovely. I’ll look out for something like that as replacement trousers. There’s a new fashion of the last five or ten years where they’ve stopped having a pocket on shirts. What harm did it do? I hate the fashion so-called “industry”. And while I’m on the subject, I hate the new coat zippers that don’t work.
I did solve it temporarily, the next time I went out, by wearing a longish jacket. But I get your message, don’t draw attention to myself in any way when I’m accompanying her.
“They sound lovely” I hope you were referring to dearie’s jeans, not to my traitor trousers.
Actually the message was: “Don’t draw BAD attention to yourself when you’re accompanying her” (it’s true that this “bad”can include so many different things, that it would be wiser not call any attention at all)
I try not to draw any attention and yes, dearie’s trousers. To have trousers fit properly, the best – and cheapest, in the long run – recourse may be to to go to a tailor.
I have had made-to-measure trousers, shorts and shirts. But only from Hong Kong: in NZ I used a chap who flew from HK to measure us up and take our orders. The goods were sent in the post later on. It worked well. In HK itself it’s even quicker of course.
I suppose once they’ve taken your measurements you need never go back, merely call them for more supplies. Just as long as you don’t change shape.
“Just as long as you don’t change shape.” If only.