Twentieth Century Boys:

“We possess nothing certainly except the past...” Evelyn Waugh.

All images are from hard copy: print, negative or transparency. These are not web grabs.

More by accident than design, from inherited family photos and my own picture collection I have collated albums illustrating the lost freedom of growing up a boy in the twentieth century, before IT consumed the world. The material suggested the topic: endless images of long dead pets, aged aunties in hats, unnamed churches and lonely windswept landscapes in lousy resolution seem less thematically solid.

Pictures come mainly from the UK, relations in the US and Europe, as prints, negatives, albums and 35mm slides. I have retouched scans – hopefully not too severely, although I am aware I’ve overdone it for the purists. As the hard copy might have come to me with zero caption information I assume some pictures have ended up in erroneous categories. I have guessed based on content, style and similarity with other pictures content and condition - if you know better let me know.

At times we were beastly little tearaways, rude, vulgarly aping our elders, desperate to be macho men, yet conversely, could revert into saluting uniformed scouts, promising a good deed each day. Denizens of the streets, waste grounds, gardens, dens, treehouses, woods, fields, lakes, coasts and forests, we were feral free without even realizing.

It seemed there was always honey for tea, after building a woodland camp and diverting a stream like muddy, sweary beavers. Trees were scaled, lakes swum in the buff, conkers bashed, knees scabbed and the odd limb snapped, encased in plaster as a monumental honour. Depression and other ailments that curse youth today, went unknown or unrecognized.

Boy, it was good!