View allAll Photos Tagged DECADE
FLASHBACK
of this movement rehearsed
a voice decries
decaying
decade’s in masterful persuasion
into roots of past seeds sown
reaching the third child
her adopted son
the youngest of the two boys
still alive
silent is his vanishing wisdom
not from sprouted seed to tree
memories
moments
flashback
a journey now
again control
a force
this power of Mother
her unmuted somatic state
cruel pitiful influence
its delicate tones shatter him yet again
articulates deliberately
in her delightful deliveries
another layer of distorted distractions
attempting an untangling this
there life long bond
of father and son
despite in her fear of a loneliness
she projects her twisted pleasure
unleashed
PJJ
After decades of seeing the familiar 'GB' sticker, I was somewhat taken aback to encounter this one today.
According to an article on the RAC website, the 'GB' IDL (International Distinguishing Letter) ceased to be valid on the 28th September this year, with the result that all vehicles travelling abroad must now display the new 'UK' IDL.
Apparently this is an exercise in inclusivity, as officially Great Britain only encompasses the 3 countries on the Mainland, whilst UK refers to the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
I wonder if that means Team GB will become Team UK in the 2024 Olympics…
A view recorded at Piazza di Porta Maggiore in Rome, where Stanga-built TAS tram unit 7079 [1949] was arriving with an ATAC Line 5 service and was followed by Socimi-built T8000 tram 9005 [1990] working a Line 14 service.
All images on this site are exclusive property and may not be copied, downloaded, reproduced, transmitted, manipulated or used in any way without expressed written permission of the photographer. All rights reserved – Copyright Don Gatehouse
This has been covered up for several decades with other signs including Sears, Fashion Gal and/or Fashion Bug, and others I can't remember. Currently a local Harley Davidson dealer is using this building to hold tons of motorcycles. I grew up blocks from this building and have never seen this until last year because it was covered up. I never even knew Kroger was in this area.
Romanian Air Force (RoAF) MiG-21MF-75 6824 (c/n 96006824/0524#) Escadrila 861 Aviatie pictured at the Bucharest International Air Show (BIAS) 2019 held at Airport Băneasa (LRBS).
The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 (Russian: Микоян и Гуревич МиГ-21; NATO reporting name: Fishbed) is a supersonic jet fighter and interceptor aircraft, designed by the Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau in the Soviet Union. Approximately 60 countries over four continents have flown the MiG-21, and it still serves many nations six decades after its maiden flight. It made aviation records, became the most-produced supersonic jet aircraft in aviation history with a stunning total of 10,645 aircraft built in the former USSR.
The Romanian Air Force (RoAF) received its first MiG-21s in 1962 and when deliveries were completed at 1990 the total stood at 322. Of these 322, 34 remain as of 2017. The original MiG-21MF is the modernized F version of the MiG-21 (NATO "Fishbed-J"). M = Modernizirovannyy ("Modernised"), F = Forsirovannyy ("Uprated [engine]")’. It was the export version of the MiG-21SM, with RP-22 radar and R13-300 turbojet. The MiG-21s still in service in the Romanian Air Force were modernized by Elbit systems of Israel and Aerostar SA of Romania (during 1995-2002) and were designated as the Lancer A, for the ground attack version, Lancer B for the trainer version and Lancer C for the air superiority version. The Lancer A and Lancer C can use both Western and Eastern armament such as the R-60M, R-73, Magic 2, or Python III missiles. This RoAF MIG-21 is a MIG-21MF Lancer-C version.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-21 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-21_var... www.scramble.nl
West German postcard by Kunst und Bild, Berlin-Charlottenburg, no. S 779. Photo: Warner Bros. Yvonne de Carlo in Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957).
Dark-haired Hollywood beauty Yvonne De Carlo (1922–2007) was a Canadian American actress, singer, and dancer whose career in film, television, and musical theatre spanned six decades. From the 1950s on, she also starred in British and Italian films. She achieved her greatest popularity as the ghoulish matriarch Lily in the TV sitcom The Munsters (1964-1966).
Yvonne De Carlo was born Margaret Yvonne Middleton in 1922 in West Point Grey (now part of Vancouver), British Columbia, Canada. She was the only child of William Middleton, an Australian-born salesman, and Marie DeCarlo, a French-born aspiring actress. Her father deserted the home, leaving her mother to make a living as a waitress. When De Carlo was ten her mother enrolled her in a local dance school and also saw that she studied dramatics. De Carlo and her mother made several trips to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood. In 1940, she was first runner-up to Miss Venice Beach, and she also came fifth in the 1940s Miss California competition. A year later, she landed a bit part as a bathing beauty in Harvard, Here I Come (Lew Landers, 1941). She also appeared in the three-minute Soundies musical, The Lamp of Memory (1942), shown in coin-operated movie jukeboxes. Other roles were slow to follow, and De Carlo took a job in the chorus line of Earl Carroll. During World War II she performed for U.S. servicemen and received many letters from GIs. She got her big break when she was chosen over a reported 20,000 girls to play the lead role as a European seductress in the Technicolor spectacle Salome, Where She Danced (Charles Lamont, 1945), with Rod Cameron and Walter Slezak. She played a dancer during the Austrian-Prussian war who is forced to flee her country after she is accused of being a spy and ends up in a lawless western town in Arizona. Producer Walter Wanger described her as "the most beautiful girl in the world." Though not a critical success, it was a box-office favourite, and the heavily-promoted De Carlo was hailed as an up-and-coming star. Universal signed her to a long-term contract. De Carlo was given a small role in the prison film Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947), starring Burt Lancaster. Two years later she was again cast opposite Lancaster in her first important role in the classic Film Noir Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949). Claudio Carvalho at IMDb: "Burt Lancaster has an outstanding performance in the role of an honest man obsessed with his former wife, who becomes a criminal trying to regain the love of his fickle ex-wife. Yvonne De Carlo is also perfect and very beautiful, in the role of a cold and manipulative woman, being a perfect 'femme-fatale'." However, Universal preferred to cast De Carlo in more conventional fare, such as Casbah (John Berry, 1948) a musical remake of the 1938 film Algiers, the adventure film River Lady (George Sherman, 1948), and Buccaneer's Girl (Frederick de Cordova, 1950). In the latter, she played a New Orleans singer who becomes involved with a Pirate Lord (Philip Friend).
When Yvonne De Carlo was in England making Hotel Sahara (Ken Annakin, 1951), she asked Universal for a release of her contract even though she still had three months to go. The studio agreed. De Carlo had always travelled extensively to promote her films and her appearances were widely publicised. In 1951 she became the first American star to visit Israel. De Carlo regularly played in European films from now on. She starred in the British comedy The Captain's Paradise (Anthony Kimmins, 1953), about a captain of a ferry boat between the restricted British colony in Gibraltar and Spanish Morocco (Alec Guinness) who keeps two wives in separate ports. De Carlo of course played the hot-blooded mistress, Nita in Tangiers. She persuaded director Anthony Kimmins to talk Alec Guinness into doing the mambo with her in a nightclub sequence. Guinness, not usually thought of as a physical actor, consented to a week's worth of dance lessons from De Carlo and the sequence is one of the film's highlights. In England, Yvonne De Carlo also co-starred with David Niven in the comedy Happy Ever After (Mario Zampi, 1954). Her film career reached its peak when director Cecil B. DeMille cast her as Sephora, the wife of Moses (Charlton Heston) in his biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956). It was to be her most prominent role. She later played a lead performance in the Civil War drama Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957) with Clark Gable, starred as Mary Magdalene in the Italian biblical epic La spada e la croce/The Sword and the Cross (Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1958), with Jorge Mistral and Rossana Podestà, and had a supporting role in the Western McLintock! (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1963) featuring John Wayne. In 1964, De Carlo was deeply in debt, her film career was over and she was suffering from depression. Then, she was offered the role of Lily Munster, the wife of Herman Munster, in the legendary TV sitcom The Munsters (1964-1966). The Munsters are a weird but honest family. Herman, the father (Fred Gwynne) is Frankenstein's monster. Lily, his wife (Yvonne De Carlo), and the cigar-chomping Grandpa, her father (Al Lewis) are vampires. Their little son Eddie (Butch Patrick) is a werewolf. Their niece Marilyn (Pat Priest) is the only normal one. She is the ugly duck of the family. The sitcom went on the air in 1964 and lasted only two seasons, but achieved a kind of pop-culture immortality in decades of reruns and movie and television spinoffs. Wolfgang Saxon in The New York Times: "In her cape and robes and with a streak of white in her black hair, Miss De Carlo’s Lily was a glamorous ghoul and a kind of Bride of Frankenstein as a homemaker, “dusting” her gothic mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane with a vacuum cleaner set on reverse. The humor mostly derived from the family members’ oblivious belief that they were no different from their neighbors." After the show's cancellation, De Carlo reprised the role as Lily Munster in the Technicolor film Munster, Go Home! (Earl Bellamy, 1966). After 1967, De Carlo became increasingly active in musicals, appearing in off-Broadway productions of Pal Joey and Catch Me If You Can. Her defining stage role was as Carlotta Campion in the original Broadway cast of Stephen Sondheim's musical Follies (1971-1972). Playing a washed-up star at a reunion of old theater colleagues, she introduced the song I'm Still Here, which would become well-known. Yvonne De Carlo married stuntman Robert Drew Morgan, whom she met on the set of the Western Shotgun (Lesley Selander, 1955). They had two sons, Bruce Ross (1956) and Michael (1957-1997). After Bob Morgan's untimely accident, De Carlo was dismissed from her contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1960. Morgan became an alcoholic and they divorced in 1974. De Carlo kept appearing in films and TV series. After her role in the TV Movie The Barefoot Executive (Susan Seidelman, 1995), she retired from acting at age 72. In 2007, she died from heart failure in Los Angeles. De Carlo was 84.
Sources: Wolfgang Saxon (The New York Times), IMDb, and Wikipedia.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
There is a common dental procedure that nearly every dentist will tell you is completely safe, despite the fact that scientists have been warning of its dangers for more than 100 years.
What is this dental procedure?
The root canal.
Root-canaled teeth are essentially “dead” teeth that can become silent incubators for highly toxic anaerobic bacteria that can, under certain conditions, make their way into your bloodstream to cause a number of serious medical conditions—many not appearing until decades later.
Most of these toxic teeth feel and look fine for many years, which make their role in systemic disease even harder to trace back.
Sadly, the vast majority of dentists are oblivious to the serious potential health risks they are exposing their patients to, risks that persist for the rest of their patients’ lives.
The American Dental Association claims root canals have been proven safe, but they have NO published data or actual research to substantiate this claim.
Dr. Weston Price, regarded by many as the greatest dentist of all time, who, more than a century ago, made the connection between root-canaled teeth and disease.
Dr. Price was a dentist and researcher who traveled the world to study the teeth, bones, and diets of native populations living without the “benefit” of modern food. Around the year 1900, Price had been treating persistent root canal infections and became suspicious that root-canaled teeth always remained infected, in spite of treatments. Then one day, he recommended to a woman, wheelchair bound for six years, to have her root canal tooth extracted, even though it appeared to be fine.
She agreed, so he extracted her tooth and then implanted it under the skin of a rabbit. The rabbit amazingly developed the same crippling arthritis as the woman and died from the infection 10 days later. But the woman, now free of the toxic tooth, immediately recovered from her arthritis and could now walk without even the assistance of a cane.
Price discovered that it’s mechanically impossible to sterilize a root-canaled (e.g. root-filled) tooth. He then went on to show that many chronic degenerative diseases originate from root-filled teeth—the most frequent being heart and circulatory diseases. He actually found 16 different causative bacterial agents for these conditions. But there were also strong correlations between root-filled teeth and diseases of the joints, brain and nervous system. Dr. Price went on to write two groundbreaking books in 1922 detailing his research into the link between dental pathology and chronic illness. Unfortunately, his work was deliberately buried for 70 years, until finally one endodontist named George Meinig recognized the importance of Price’s work and sought to explain the truth.
Dr. Meinig, a native of Chicago, was a captain in the U.S. Army during World War II before moving to Hollywood to become a dentist for the stars. He eventually became one of the founding members of the American Association of Endodontists (root canal specialists).
In the 1990s, he spent 18 months immersed in Dr. Price’s research. In June of 1993, Dr. Meinig published the book Root Canal Cover-Up, which continues to be the most comprehensive reference on this topic today.
Your teeth are made of the hardest substances in your body.
In the middle of each tooth is the pulp chamber, a soft living inner structure that houses blood vessels and nerves. Surrounding the pulp chamber is the dentin, which is made of living cells that secrete a hard mineral substance. The outermost and hardest layer of your tooth is the white enamel, which encases the dentin.
The roots of each tooth descend into your jawbone and are held in place by the periodontal ligament. In dental school, dentists are taught that each tooth has one to four major canals. However, there are accessory canals that are never mentioned. Literally miles of them!
Just as your body has large blood vessels that branch down into very small capillaries, each of your teeth has a maze of very tiny tubules that, if stretched out, would extend for three miles. Weston Price identified as many as 75 separate accessory canals in a single central incisor (front tooth). Microscopic organisms regularly move in and around these tubules, like gophers in underground tunnels.
When a dentist performs a root canal, he or she hollows out the tooth, then fills the hollow chamber with a substance (called guttapercha), which cuts off the tooth from its blood supply, so fluid can no longer circulate through the tooth. But the maze of tiny tubules remains. And bacteria, cut off from their food supply, hide out in these tunnels where they are remarkably safe from antibiotics and your own body’s immune defenses.
Under the stresses of oxygen and nutrient deprivation, these formerly friendly organisms morph into stronger, more virulent anaerobes that produce a variety of potent toxins. What were once ordinary, friendly oral bacteria mutate into highly toxic pathogens lurking in the tubules of the dead tooth, just awaiting an opportunity to spread.
No amount of sterilization has been found effective in reaching these tubules—and just about every single root-canaled tooth has been found colonized by these bacteria, especially around the apex and in the periodontal ligament. Oftentimes, the infection extends down into the jawbone where it creates cavitations—areas of necrotic tissue in the jawbone itself.
Cavitations are areas of unhealed bone, often accompanied by pockets of infected tissue and gangrene. Sometimes they form after a tooth extraction (such as a wisdom tooth extraction), but they can also follow a root canal. According to Weston Price Foundation, in the records of 5,000 surgical cavitation cleanings, only two were found healed.
And all of this occurs with few, if any, accompanying symptoms. So you may have an abscessed dead tooth and not know it. This focal infection in the immediate area of the root-canaled tooth is bad enough, but the damage doesn’t stop there.
As long as your immune system remains strong, any bacteria that stray away from the infected tooth are captured and destroyed. But once your immune system is weakened by something like an accident or illness or other trauma, your immune system may be unable to keep the infection in check.
These bacteria can migrate out into surrounding tissues by hitching a ride into your blood stream, where they are transported to new locations to set up camp. The new location can be any organ or gland or tissue.
Dr. Price was able to transfer diseases harbored by humans to rabbits, by implanting fragments of root-canaled teeth, as mentioned above. He found that root canal fragments from a person who had suffered a heart attack, when implanted into a rabbit, would cause a heart attack in the rabbit within a few weeks.
He discovered he could transfer heart disease to the rabbit 100 percent of the time! Other diseases were more than 80 percent transferable by this method. Nearly every chronic degenerative disease has been linked with root canals, including:
Heart disease
Kidney disease
Arthritis, joint, and rheumatic diseases
Neurological diseases (including ALS and MS)
Autoimmune diseases (Lupus and more)
There may also be a cancer connection. Dr. Robert Jones, a researcher of the relationship between root canals and breast cancer, found an extremely high correlation between root canals and breast cancer. He claims to have found the following correlations in a five-year study of 300 breast cancer cases:
93 percent of women with breast cancer had root canals
7 percent had other oral pathology
Tumors, in the majority of cases, occurred on the same side of the body as the root canal(s) or other oral pathology.
Dr. Jones claims that toxins from the bacteria in an infected tooth or jawbone are able to inhibit the proteins that suppress tumor development. A German physician reported similar findings. Dr. Josef Issels reported that, in his 40 years of treating “terminal” cancer patients, 97 percent of his cancer patients had root canals. If these physicians are correct, the cure for cancer may be as simple as having a tooth pulled, then rebuilding your immune system.
Built in 1872, the Knight Foundry predated electricity. Water piped from a Mother Lode flume spun old-fashioned turbines, the biggest nearly 4 feet across.
A system of shafts and buffalo-hide drive belts transferred power throughout the factory to 60 different machines. Knight Foundry is America's last water-powered 19th-century ironworks. Closed for over a decade, the Foundry finally reopened to temporary public visitation. The group tasked with protecting and interpreting the factory recently raised the $300,000 necessary to continue its legacy. I am so happy that it is here to share the history. Let's keep supporting the foundry.
A few days ago (early November 2024) I visited the village of Claverley. It had been many years - indeed decades - since my last visit and I wondered if or how much it had changed. The answer was, not a lot! This image was taken during the Spring of 2007 and with the exception of the closing of the Kings Arms pub and the number of parked cars the place still looked the same. Out of interest the village still has two pubs.
Berlin boasts two zoological gardens, a consequence of decades of political and administrative division of the city. The older one, called Zoo Berlin, founded in 1844, is situated in what is now called the "City West". It is the most species-rich zoo worldwide. The other one, called Tierpark Berlin ("Animal Park"), was established on the long abandoned premises of Friedrichsfelde Manor Park in the eastern borough of Lichtenberg, in 1954. Covering 160 ha, it is the largest landcape zoo in Europe.
Rund 15 Prozent der Erdoberfläche werden von Savannen bedeckt. Damit gehören sie zu den größten und wichtigsten Lebensräumen des Planeten. Seit dem 26. Mai 2023 wird Besucher*innen im Tierpark Berlin ein Einblick in diese faszinierende Landschaft gewährt und sie können mehr über die unterschiedlichen Bewohner der ostafrikanischen Savanne und ihren natürlichen Lebensraum erfahren.
Ein wahrer Höhepunkt der neuen Tierpark-Savanne ist der 120 Meter lange Giraffenpfad: Hier werden die Gäste den bis zu fünf Meter hohen Grazien der Savanne zukünftig auf Augenhöhe begegnen können – wer sich traut, bahnt sich den Weg durch den Wald bis zu den Aussichtsplattformen über eine abenteuerliche Hängebrücke. Der Tierpark Berlin erreicht mit der Eröffnung der Afrikanischen Savannenlandschaft ein neues Etappenziel auf seinem Weg zu einem Zoo der Zukunft. Seit knapp neun Jahren wird der 1955 gegründete und 160 Hektar große Tierpark Berlin zu einem naturnahen Geozoo umgebaut. Um einen Einblick in den Lebensraum der einzelnen Tierarten und deren Interaktionen, Besonderheiten und Problematiken zu ermöglichen, werden die Tiere im Tierpark größtenteils nach geografischen Gesichtspunkten zu sehen sein.
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Around 15 per cent of the earth's surface is covered by savannahs. This makes them one of the largest and most important habitats on the planet. Since 26 May 2023, visitors to Tierpark Berlin have been given an insight into this fascinating landscape and can learn more about the different inhabitants of the East African savannah and their natural habitat.
A true highlight of the new zoo savannah is the 120-metre-long giraffe trail: here, guests will be able to meet the up to five-metre-high graces of the savannah at eye level in future - those who dare will make their way through the forest to the viewing platforms via an adventurous suspension bridge. With the opening of the African Savannah Landscape, Tierpark Berlin has reached a new milestone on its way to becoming a zoo of the future. For almost nine years, the 160-hectare Tierpark Berlin, which was founded in 1955, has been transformed into a near-natural geozoo. In order to provide an insight into the habitat of the individual animal species and their interactions, peculiarities and problems, the animals in the zoo will largely be seen according to geographical aspects.
Berlin boasts two zoological gardens, a consequence of decades of political and administrative division of the city. The older one, called Zoo Berlin, founded in 1844, is situated in what is now called "City West". It is the most species-rich zoo worldwide. The other one, called Tierpark Berlin ("Animal Park"), was established on the long abandoned premises of Friedrichsfelde Palace Park in the eastern borough of Lichtenberg, in 1954. Covering 160 ha, it is the largest landcape zoo in Europe, but with less species.
Today, for the first time in about a decade, I climbed the hundreds of narrow, spiral steps to the summit of the Scott Monument. At over two hundred feet it is not only the largest monument to a writer in the British Isles, but the entire world. Not a king, not some triumphant general, our city's enormous monument is to an author. I have always thought that to be an immensely civilised thing.
The final spiral, stone staircase is so narrow I literally could not fit through the last part, I had to turn sideways, it was narrower than my shoulders. And it was worth it for the views. Two hundred feet above this most gorgeous of cities, with its rich history and ancient geology. I'll upload more later - after such exhausting climb I descended and went for some well-earned pints in the nearby pub with a chum and his hounds.
But for now I will upload this view, looking east, the great Scots-Baronial architecture of the Balmoral Hotel on the left catching the low winter sun, the vast glass roofs of the Waverley Railway Station, to the right the banked levels of the Old Town on its steeps volcanic slops, behind and on the upper right Arthur's Seat, a huge extinct volcano right in the middle of our city, part of the Royal Park of Holyrood (the palace sits at its base). From almost every angle Edinburgh offers up astonishing views, but from up in the air on this monument to storytelling it gives some of the most splendid views. History, literature, architecture and geology all in a single view.
My beautiful Edinburgh, seen on a cold, bright, winter's day. I love living in this glorious city built of history and geology and books and writing. Taken from a towering monument to a teller of stories, a makar.
Big East-German card by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 65/72,1972. Jack Lemmon and Judi West in The Fortune Cookie (Billy Wilder, 1966).
Versatile and beloved American actor Jack Lemmon (1925-2001) was a virtuoso in both comedy and drama. He initially acted on TV before moving to Hollywood, cultivating a career that would span decades. Lemmon starred in over 60 films including Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), Irma la Douce (1963), The Odd Couple (1968), Save the Tiger (1973) and Grumpy Old Men (1993). Some of his most beloved performances stemmed from his collaborations with acclaimed director Billy Wilder and with his fellow friend and actor Walter Matthau.
Jack Lemmon was born John Uhler Lemmon III in 1925, in an elevator at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was the only child of Mildred Lankford Noel and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., the president of a doughnut company. He later described his flamboyant, authoritarian mother as 'Tallulah Bankhead on a roadshow.' He laughed about how she used to hang out with her girlfriends at the Ritz Bar in Boston and how she tried to have her cremation ashes placed on the bar (the management refused). Jack attended Ward Elementary near his Newton, MA home. At age 9 he was sent to Rivers Country Day School, then located in nearby Brookline. After RCDS, he went to high school at Phillips Andover Academy. Jack Lemmon attended Harvard, where he became president of the Hasty Pudding Club, the university's famous acting club. During WW II, he served in the Naval Reserve and was the communications officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Lake Champlain CV-39. After serving as a Navy ensign, he worked in a beer hall playing the piano. Then, Lemmon followed his passion for theatre. His father didn't approve of his son taking up acting, but told him he should continue with it only as long as he felt passion for it. Soon, Jack landed small roles on radio, off-Broadway, TV and Broadway. In 1953, he was very successful on Broadway with 'Room Service', after which he went to Hollywood. He signed a contract with Columbia Pictures. His film debut was opposite Judy Holliday in the romantic comedy It Should Happen to You (George Cukor, 1954). He was loaned to Warner Bros. in 1955 for his fourth film. There, he had his breakthrough as Ensign Pulver in the war drama Mister Roberts (John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy, 1955) starring Henry Fonda and James Cagney. His complex portrayal of this somewhat dishonest but sensitive character earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Lemmon would go on to work on a number of films with comedian and close friend Ernie Kovacs, including Bell Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958) starring James Stewart and Kim Novak. In 1959, Lemmon gave one of the top comedic performances of his career when he starred alongside Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in the romantic comedy Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959). He received an Oscar nomination for his role and he did the next year, for The Appartement (Billy Wilder, (1960) in which he co-starred with Shirley MacLaine. This led to several more collaborations with director Billy Wilder and great success on the big screen throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Jack Lemmon also excelled in drama. He received an Oscar nomination for his role as an alcoholic in Days of Wine and Roses (Blake Edwards, 1962) and later followed more nominations for the dramas The China Syndrome (James Bridges, 1979), Tribute (Bob Clark, 1980) and Missing (Costa-Gravas, 1982). Kyle Perez at IMDb: "Sometimes referred to as "America's Everyman", Lemmon's versatility as an actor helped the audience more closely identify and relate to him. He was able always to elicit a laugh or sympathy from his viewers and his charismatic presence always shined on the big screen. He often portrayed the quintessence of an aspiring man and established a lasting impression on the film industry." Lemmon reunited with Shirley MacLaine in another Wilder film, Irma la Douce (Billy Wilder, 1963). It was one of the biggest commercial successes for the trio. The Fortune Cookie (Billy Wilder, 1966) served as the start of a comedic partnership between Lemmon and Walter Matthau and the two would come together again, two years later, for The Odd Couple (Gene Saks, 1968), based on a play by Neil Simon. It is one of their most endearing films together. As the 1970s came around, Lemmon began to undertake more dramatic roles and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Harry Stoner in Save the Tiger (John G. Avildsen, 1973). Lemmon admitted to having had a serious drinking problem at one time, which is one reason he looked back on his Oscar-winning role as perhaps the most gratifying, emotionally fulfilling performance of his career. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Lemmon continued to excel in his character performances and earned the Cannes Best Actor award for The China Syndrome (James Bridges, 1979) and Missing (Costa-Gravas, 1982). As a director, he made his film debut with Kotch (Jack Lemmon, 1971) and his Broadway debut with Eugene O'Neill's 'Long Day's Journey into Night'. In 1988 he received the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. In the 1990s, he continued to have success with roles in films such as Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992) and Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993). In the comedy Grumpy Old Men (Donald Petrie, 1993), he was reunited with Walter Matthau. The film was a huge success, and a sequel was even released in 1995. A sequel to The Odd Couple was also released in 1998. In 1997, he received a Golden Globe nomination for the television adaptation of 12 Angry Men (William Friedkin, 1997). Lemmon was married twice, first to actress Cynthia Stone (1950-1956) and his second marriage to actress Felicia Farr lasted from 1972 till his death. Jack Lemmon passed away in 2001 in Los Angeles at the age of 76. He had two children, Chris Lemmon (1954) and Courtney Lemmon (1966). Actress Sydney Lemmon is his granddaughter.
Sources: Ed Stephan (IMDb), Kyle Perez (IMDb), Wikipedia (Dutch) and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
More than two decades ago I was in Berea watching trains when an eastbound CSX manifest freight stopped to wait on traffic ahead. The locomotive engineer invited me to come up to the cab to get some photographs. The view is looking east on the engineer's side. (Scanned from color negative film)
Vintage postcard, no. PP 059. Caption: Madonna IV.
Madonna or Madonna Louise Ciccone (1958) is an American singer, songwriter, and actress. During the MTV craze in the 1980s, Madonna pushed boundaries with her song texts and her provocative performances. She frequently reinvented herself and her music and stayed the 'Queen of Pop' for decades. Her global bestsellers were hits such as Like a Virgin (1984) and True Blue (1986), but for us she became more interesting with songs like Like a Prayer (1989), Vogue (1991) and Frozen (1998). And we're still fan, even of some of her films, including Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Truth or Dare (1991), and Evita (1996). The remarkable, hyper-ambitious Material Girl who never stops reinventing herself, Madonna is a seven-time Grammy Award-winner who has sold over three hundred million records and CDs to adoring fans worldwide.
Madonna was born Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1958 in Bay City, Michigan. Her father is Italian, her mother was French-Canadian. Her siblings are Anthony Ciccone (1956), Martin Ciccone (1957), Paula Ciccone (1959), Christopher Ciccone (1960), and Melanie Henry (1962). In 1962, Madonna's mother, pregnant with her sixth child, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She delayed treatment until her baby was born, but by that time it was too late. A harrowing, yearlong battle with the disease ensued. She lost her battle with cancer in 1963. In 1978, Madonna moved to New York and studied with renowned choreographer Alvin Ailey. She joined up with the Patrick Hernandez Revue, formed a pop/dance band called 'Breakfast Club', and began working with then-boyfriend Stephen Bray on recording several disco-oriented songs. New York producer/D.J. Mark Kamins passed her demo tapes to Sire Records in early 1982 and the rest is history. The 1980s was Madonna's boom decade, and she dominated the music charts with a succession of multimillion-selling albums. Madonna first appeared on screen in two low-budget films marketed to an adolescent audience: A Certain Sacrifice (Stephen Jon Lewicki, 1979) and Crazy for You (Harold Becker, 1985), starring Matthew Modine. Her first film, A Certain Sacrifice (1979), was released in 1985, after she became a star, but was actually shot in two parts, the first in 1979, and the other, in 1981. However, she scored a minor cult hit with Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985) starring alongside spunky Rosanna Arquette. In 1984, she started fashion trends with her unique look using rosaries and crosses as jewelry and black rubber typewriter bands as bracelets. Legions of adolescent girls mimicked her look and a Madonna clothing store was opened in New York. Again in 2001, another huge fashion trend was set off by the "Material Mom", this time with western wear - cowboy hats and mud-splattered jeans. In 1986, she starred with then-husband Sean Penn in Shanghai Surprise (Jim Goddard, 1986), which was savaged by critics. She managed to somewhat improve her standing in the cinema with her next two films, the off-beat Who's That Girl (James Foley, 1987) and the quirky Damon Runyon-inspired Bloodhounds of Broadway (Howard Brookner, 1989).
Madonna played in the big-budget and star-filled Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty, 1990) bad girl Breathless Mahoney flirting with Warren Beatty. The epic failed to catch fire at the box office. Taking an earthier role, Madonna was much more entertaining alongside Tom Hanks and Geena Davis in A League of Their Own (Penny Marshall, 1992), a story about female baseball players during W.W.II. However, she again drew the wrath of critics with the whodunit Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1992) with Willem Dafoe, an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of the sexy Sharon Stone thriller Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992). Several other minor screen roles followed, then Madonna starred as Eva Perón opposite Jonathan Pryce and Antonio Banderas in Evita (Alan Parker, 1996), a fairly well-received screen adaptation of the hugely successful Broadway musical, for which she received a Golden Globe for Best Actress. The Material Girl stayed away from the film cameras for several years, returning to co-star with Rupert Everett in the lukewarm romantic comedy The Next Best Thing (John Schlesinger, 2000), followed by the painful Swept Away (2002) for husband Guy Ritchie. If those films weren't bad enough, she was woefully miscast as a vampish fencing instructor in the James Bond adventure Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002) starring Pierce Brosnan. Madonna began a directing career in 2008 with the comedy Filth and Wisdom (Madonna, 2008), and a year later she reunited with Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) director Alek Keshishian to develop a script about the relationship between the Duke of Windsor and the Duchess of Windsor that led to his abdication in 1936: the result, a movie named W.E. (Madonna, 2011), starring James D'Arcy and Andrea Riseborough as the infernal but still royal couple. The film was released in 2011 to lukewarm critics but it gathered one Oscar nomination for costumes and won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song for 'Masterpiece'. Madonna has 6 children: daughter, Lourdes Leon (1996) with an ex-boyfriend, Carlos Leon, son, Rocco Ritchie (2000), and adoptive son, David Banda Mwale Ciccone Ritchie (2005) with ex-husband, Guy Ritchie, and adoptive daughters, Mercy James Ciccone (2006), Estere Ciccone and Stella Ciccone (2012).
Source: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4529/1, 1929-1930. Photo: MGM.
American film star Joan Crawford (1904-1977) had a career that would span many decades, studios, and controversies. In her silent films, she made an impact as a vivacious Jazz Age flapper and later she matured into a star of psychological melodramas.
Joan Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur in 1904, in San Antonio, Texas. Her parents were Anna Belle (Johnson) and Thomas E. LeSueur, a laundry labourer. By the time she was born, her parents had separated. The young Lucille was bullied and shunned at Scaritt Elementary School in Kansas City by the other students due to her poor home life. She worked with her mother in a laundry and felt that her classmates could smell the chemicals and cleaners on her. She said that her love of taking showers and being obsessed with cleanliness had begun early in life as an attempt to wash off the smell of the laundry. Her stepfather Henry Cassin allegedly began sexually abusing her when she was eleven years old, and the abuse continued until she was sent to St. Agnes Academy, a Catholic girls' school. By the time she was a teenager, she'd had three stepfathers. Lucille LeSueur worked a variety of menial jobs. She was a good dancer, though, and she entered several contests, one of which landed her a spot in a chorus line. Before long, she was dancing in the choruses of travelling revues in big Midwestern and East Coast cities. She was spotted dancing in Detroit by famous New York producer Jacob J. Shubert. Shubert put her in the chorus line for his show 'Innocent Eyes'(1924) at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. Then followed another Schubert production, 'The Passing Show of 1924'. After-hours, she danced for pay in the town it-spot, Club Richman, which was run by the 'Passing Show' stage manager Nils Granlund and popular local personality Harry Richman. In December 1924, Granlund called Lucille to tell her that Al Altman, a NYC-based talent scout from MGM had caught her in 'The Passing Show of 1924' and wanted her to do a screen test. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) offered Crawford a contract at $75 a week. On New Year's Day 1925 she boarded the train for Culver City. Credited as Lucille LeSueur, her first film part was as a showgirl in Lady of the Night (Monta Bell, 1925), starring MGM's most popular female star, Norma Shearer. Crawford was determined to succeed, and shortly after she also appeared in The Circle (Frank Borzage, 1925) and Pretty Ladies (Monta Bell, 1925), starring comedian ZaSu Pitts. She also appeared in a small role Erich von Stroheim's classic The Merry Widow (1925) with Mae Murray and John Gilbert. MGM publicity head Pete Smith recognised her ability to become a major star but felt her name sounded fake. He told studio head , Louis B. Mayer, that her last name, LeSueur, reminded him of a sewer. Smith organised a contest called 'Name the Star' in Movie Weekly to allow readers to select her new stage name. The initial choice was 'Joan Arden', but after another actress was found to have prior claim to that name, the alternate surname 'Crawford' became the choice. She first made an impression on audiences in Edmund Goulding's showgirl tale Sally, Irene and Mary (1925). The film, which co-starred Constance Bennett and Sally O'Neil, was a hit. Joan's popularity grew so quickly afterwards that two films in which she was still billed as Lucille Le Sueur: Old Clothes (Edward F. Cline, 1925) with Jackie Coogan, and The Only Thing (Jack Conway, 1925) were recalled, and her name on the billings was changed to Joan Crawford. In 1926, Crawford was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars, and she starred opposite Charles Ray in Paris (Edmund Goulding, 1926). Within a few years, she became the romantic female lead to many of MGM's top male stars, including Ramón Novarro, John Gilbert, and action star Tim McCoy. She appeared alongside her close friend, William Haines in the comedy Spring Fever (Edward Sedgwick, 1927). It was the second film starring Haines and Crawford (the first had been Sally, Irene and Mary (1925)), and their first onscreen romantic teaming. Then, Crawford appeared in the silent horror film The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927), starring Lon Chaney, Sr., who played Alonzo the Armless, a circus freak who uses his feet to toss knives. Crawford played his skimpily-clad young carnival assistant whom he hopes to marry. She stated that she learned more about acting from watching Chaney work than from anyone else in her career. Her role of Diana Medford in Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928) elevated her to star status. Joan co-starred with Anita Page and Dorothy Sebastian, and her spunky wild-but-moral flapper character struck a chord with the public and zeitgeist. Wikipedia: "The role established her as a symbol of modern 1920s-style femininity which rivaled Clara Bow, the original It girl, then Hollywood's foremost flapper. A stream of hits followed Our Dancing Daughters, including two more flapper-themed movies, in which Crawford embodied for her legion of fans (many of whom were women) an idealized vision of the free-spirited, all-American girl." The fan mail began pouring in and from that point on Joan was a bonafide star. Crawford had cleared the first big hurdle; now came the second, in the form of talkies. But Crawford wasn't felled by sound. Her first talkie, the romantic drama Untamed (Jack Conway, 1929) with Robert Montgomery, was a success. Michael Eliott at IMDb: "It's rather amazing to see how well she transformed into a sound star and you have to think that she was among the best to do so."
In the early 1930s, tired of playing fun-loving flappers, Joan Crawford wanted to change her image. Thin lips would not do for her; she wanted big lips. Ignoring her natural lip contours, Max Factor ran a smear of colour across her upper and lower lips. It was just what she wanted. To Max, the Crawford look, which became her trademark, was always 'the smear'.
As the 1930s progressed, Joan Crawford became one of the biggest stars at MGM. She developed a glamorous screen image, appearing often as a sumptuously gowned, fur-draped, successful career woman. She was in top form in films such as Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932), Sadie McKee (Clarence Brown, 1934), No More Ladies (Edward H. Griffith, 1935), and Love on the Run (W.S. Van Dyke, 1936) with Clark Gable.
Crawford often played hard-working young women who found romance and success. Movie patrons were enthralled, and studio executives were satisfied. Her fame rivalled, and later outlasted, that of MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Among her early successes as a dramatic actress were The Women (George Cukor, 1939), Susan and God (1940), Strange Cargo (1940), and A Woman’s Face (1941).
By the early 1940s, MGM was no longer giving Joan Crawford plum roles. Newcomers had arrived in Hollywood, and the public wanted to see them. Crawford left MGM for rival Warner Bros. In 1945 she landed the role of a lifetime in Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945). It is the story of an emotional and ambitious woman who rises from waitress to owner of a restaurant chain. The role gave her an opportunity to show her range as an actress, and her performance as a woman driven to give her daughter (Ann Blyth) everything garnered Crawford her first, and only, Oscar for Best Actress. The following year she appeared with John Garfield in the well-received Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946). In 1947, she appeared as Louise Graham in Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) with Van Heflin. Again she was nominated for a Best Actress from the Academy, but she lost to Loretta Young in The Farmer's Daughter (H.C. Potter, 1947). Crawford continued to choose her roles carefully, and in 1952 she was nominated for a third time, for her depiction of Myra Hudson in Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952) opposite Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame. This time the coveted Oscar went to Shirley Booth, for Come Back, Little Sheba (Daniel Mann, 1952). In 1955, Crawford became involved with the Pepsi-Cola Company through her marriage to company Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Alfred Steele. Crawford married four times. Her first three marriages to the actors Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (1929–1933), Franchot Tone (1935–1939), and Phillip Terry (1942–1946) all had ended in divorce. After his death in 1959 she became a director of the company and in that role hired her friend Dorothy Arzner to film several Pepsi commercials. Crawford's film career slowed and she appeared in minor roles until 1962. Then she and Bette Davis co-starred in Whatever happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962). Their longstanding rivalry may have helped fuel their phenomenally vitriolic and well-received performances. Crawford's final appearance on the silver screen was in the bad monster movie Trog (Freddie Francis, 1970). It is said Bette Davis commented that if she had found herself starring in Trog, she'd commit suicide. Anyway, Joan Crawford retired from the screen, and following a public appearance in 1974 withdrew from public life. Turning to vodka more and more, she became increasingly reclusive. In 1977, Joan Crawford died of a heart attack in New York City. She was 72 years old. She had disinherited her adopted daughter Christina and son Christopher; the former wrote the controversial memoir 'Mommie Dearest' (1978). In 1981, Faye Dunaway starred in the film adaptation Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981) which did well at the box office. Joan Crawford is interred in a mausoleum in Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
Sources: Stephanie Jones (The Best of Everything), Michael Elliott (IMDb), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Less than a decade after the nend of the Feral War, most of the Continent was still rebuilding itself. Nations, devastated by the Blighting or exhausted from fighting the Ferals, were content to leave their neighbours alone and focus on protecting their own citizens from further Feral attacks and to restart normal economic activities. However, this wasn't the case for all nations. The Straser Imperium had been one of the most powerful nations on the Continent before the war, but its proximity to the Hortlands meant that it suffered enormous losses in the Blighting. The Politburo made a decision to conserve what little strength remained, and refused to risk their forces in the Great Scouring, although they still laid claim to all their former territories. This lead to a virtual ostracization from the other nations on the Continent once the war was over, further hampering rebuilding efforts. Feeling this was undue persecution from hostile enemies, the Politburo wanted revenge.
The Imperator-Class dreadnaught is the embodiment of this revenge. Built in secret in slightly less than a decade after the end of the Feral War, two of these behemoths were completed, nearly stripping the entire nations of its resources at the time. The first use of these ships, atttacking a Casian settlement, signalled the beginning of the Continental War.
With a crew of over 6000 men, it takes a small town to man these vessels. They are built around their primary armaments, three massive quad-barreled battery turrets. The ships are meant to be used at extreme range, using their superior calibre of guns to out-range enemy ships.
While they do have a massive blindspot underneath, this is mitigated by the fact that they are always escorted by numerous support vessels and can lower altitude very quickly due to their weight.
The Imperator is so resource-intensive that only one can ever be in use at a time. However, both the IAS Imperator and the IAS Vengeance were sortied together at one point during the Continental War. This proved to be fatal, as so tempting a target drew the attention of the Allied Navies and they sent almost every ship in their collective arsenal after them, destroying the IAS Vengeance. This signalled the beginning of the end not only of the Continental War, but also of the Imperator-class.
The remaining IAS Imperator was recalled and repaired with what was supposed to be a third Imperator-class then under construction. The IAS Imperator was never seen outside Imperial airspace again.
Although ultimately they failed to bring about the revenge of the Straser Imperium, the Imperator-class is still a formidable opponent, with nothing in the skies coming even close to its sheer size or firepower. However, it has been proven they are not invulnerable, and though it still enjoys a reputation as a frightful opponent, much of the mystique and terror of this ship class are no longer what they were during the height of its fire-bombing days.
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The Photograph
A 5" x 10" high-definition glossy photograph published by Rotary Photographic of London EC.
George Robey
Sir George Edward Wade, CBE, known professionally as George Robey, was an English comedian, singer and actor in musical theatre, who became known as one of the greatest music hall performers of the late 19th. and early 20th. centuries.
As a comedian, he mixed everyday situations and observations with comic absurdity. Apart from his music hall acts, he was a popular Christmas pantomime performer in the English provinces, where he excelled in the dame roles.
He scored notable successes in musical revues during and after the Great War, particularly with the song "If You Were the Only Girl in the World", which he performed with Violet Loraine in the revue The Bing Boys Are Here (1916).
One of George's best-known original characters in his six-decade long career was the Prime Minister of Mirth.
Born in London, Robey came from a middle-class family. After schooling in England and Germany, and a series of office jobs, he made his debut on the London stage at the age of 21, as the straight man to a comic hypnotist.
Robey soon developed his own act, and appeared at the Oxford Music Hall in 1890, where he earned favourable notices singing "The Simple Pimple," and "He'll Get It Where He's Gone to Now".
In 1892, he appeared in his first pantomime, Whittington Up-to-Date in Brighton, which brought him to a wider audience. More provincial engagements followed in Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, and he became a mainstay of the popular Christmas pantomime scene.
Robey's music hall act matured in the first decade of the 1900's, and he undertook several foreign tours. He starred in the Royal Command Performance in 1912, and regularly entertained before aristocracy.
George was an avid sportsman, playing cricket and football at a semi-professional level. During the Great War, in addition to his performances in revues, he raised money for many war charities, and was appointed a CBE in 1919.
From 1918, he created sketches based on his Prime Minister of Mirth character, and used a costume he had designed in the 1890's as a basis for the character's attire.
George made a successful transition from music hall to variety shows, and starred in the revue Round in Fifty in 1922, which earned him still wider notice. With the exception of his performances in revue and pantomime, he appeared as his Prime Minister of Mirth character in all the other entertainment media including variety, music hall and radio.
In 1913 Robey made his film debut, but he had only modest success in the medium. He continued to perform in variety theatre in the inter-war years and, in 1932, starred in Helen!, his first straight theatre role. His appearance brought him to the attention of many influential directors, including Sydney Carroll, who signed him to appear on stage as Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 in 1935, a role that he later repeated in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film, Henry V.
During the Second World War, Robey raised money for charities and promoted recruitment into the forces. By the 1950's, his health had deteriorated, and he entered into semi-retirement. George was knighted a few months before his death in 1954.
-- George Robey - The Early Years
Robey was born on the 20th. September 1869 at 334 Kennington Road, Kennington, London. He would later claim that he was born in the more affluent area of Herne Hill, although this was incorrect. His birthplace in Kennington is a three-storey house above a shop, which was then a hardware outlet. The shop is now home to a sushi restaurant called Sushi Essence.
In the 1860's, Kennington Road was a wealthy area mainly inhabited by successful tradesmen and businessmen. By the 1880's however, the area had fallen into a decline, and was considered by locals to be one of the most impoverished areas in London. The comedian Charlie Chaplin, who had a poor and deprived upbringing, was born in the same road 18 years after Robey.
George's father, Charles Wade, was a civil engineer who spent much of his career on tramline design and construction. Robey's mother, Elizabeth Mary Wade, née Keene, was a housewife; he also had two sisters.
George's paternal ancestors originated from Hampshire; his uncle, George Wade, married into the aristocracy in 1848, a link which provided a proud topic of conversation for future generations of the Wade family.
When Robey was five, his father moved the family to Birkenhead, where he helped in the construction of the Mersey Railway. Robey began his schooling in nearby Hoylake at a dame school. Three years later the family moved back to London, near the border between Camberwell and Peckham.
At around this time, trams were being introduced to the area, providing Charles Wade with a regular, well-paid job.
To fulfil an offer of work, Charles moved the family to Germany in 1880, and Robey attended a school in Dresden. He devoted his leisure hours to visiting the city's museums, art galleries and opera houses, and gained a reasonable fluency in German by the time he was 12.
He enjoyed life in Germany, and was impressed by the many operatic productions held in the city, and by the Germans' high regard for the arts.
When he was 14, his father allowed George to move in with a clergyman's family in the German countryside, which he used as a base while studying science at Leipzig University. In order to earn money, he taught English to his landlord's children, and minded them while their parents were at work.
Having successfully enrolled at the university, George studied art and music, and stayed with the family for a further 18 months so he could complete his studies before returning to England in 1885. He later claimed, apparently untruthfully, to have studied at the University of Cambridge.
There is no evidence that Robey enrolled at Cambridge or indeed any other English university, as fees in Victorian England were beyond the reach of someone like Charles Wade. Members of the theatrical community were nevertheless convinced of his attendance at Cambridge.
The theatre critic Max Beerbohm wrote that Robey was one of the few distinguished men to emerge from the campus, but the English writer Neville Cardus was more sceptical, wondering how someone from the University of Cambridge could end up in the music hall.
Robey's biographer, Peter Cotes, concludes that he likely played along with the assumptions that he was a Cambridge graduate in order to fit in with the higher circles of society.
At the age of 18, Robey travelled to Birmingham, where he worked in a civil engineer's office. It was here that he became interested in a career on the stage, and often dreamed of starring in his own circus.
He learned to play the mandolin, and became a skilled performer on the instrument. This drew interest from a group of local musicians and, together with a friend from the group who played the guitar, Robey travelled the local area in search of engagements.
Soon afterwards, they were hired to play at a charity concert at the local church in Edgbaston, a performance that led to more local bookings. For his next appearance, Robey performed an impromptu version of "Killaloo", a comic ditty taken from the burlesque Miss Esmeralda.
The positive response from the audience encouraged him to give up playing the mandolin to concentrate instead on singing comic songs.
-- George Robey's London Debut
By 1890 Robey had become homesick, and so he returned to South London, where he worked for a civil engineering company. He also joined a local branch of the Thirteen Club, which charged members a fee of half a crown a year. The club members, including both amateur and professional performers, were devoted to the idea of flouting superstition while staging concerts in public houses and small venues across London.
Hearing of George's talent, the founder of the club, W. H. Branch, invited Robey to appear at Anderton's Hotel in Fleet Street, where he performed the popular new comic song "Where Did You Get That Hat?".
Robey's performance secured him private engagements for which he was paid a guinea a night. By the early months of 1891, Robey was much in demand, and he decided to change his stage name. He swapped "Wade" for "Robey" after working for a company in Birmingham that bore the latter name.
It was at around this time that he met E. W. Rogers, an established music hall composer who wrote songs for Marie Lloyd and Jenny Hill. For Robey, Rogers wrote three songs: "My Hat's a Brown 'Un", "The Simple Pimple," and "It Suddenly Dawned Upon Me".
In 1891 Robey visited the Royal Aquarium in Westminster where he watched "Professor Kennedy", a burlesque mesmerist from America. After the performance, Robey visited Kennedy in his dressing room, and offered himself as the stooge for his next appearance.
They agreed that Robey, as his young apprentice, would be "mesmerised" into singing a comic song. At a later rehearsal, Robey negotiated a deal to sing one of the comic songs that had been written for him by Rogers.
Robey's turn was a great success, and as a result he secured a permanent theatrical residency at the venue. Later that year, he appeared as a solo act at the Oxford Music Hall, where he performed "The Simple Pimple" and "He'll Get It Where He's Gone to Now".
The theatrical press soon became aware of his act, and The Stage called him:
"A comedian with a pretty sense of
humour who delivers his songs with
considerable point and meets with
all success".
In early 1892 Robey starred alongside Jenny Hill, Bessie Bonehill and Harriet Vernon at the Paragon Theatre of Varieties in Mile End, where, according to his biographer Peter Cotes:
"He stole the notices from
experienced troupers".
That summer, Robey conducted a music hall tour of the English provinces which began in Chatham and took him to Liverpool, at a venue owned by the mother of the influential London impresario Oswald Stoll. Through this engagement Robey met Stoll, and the two became lifelong friends.
In early December, Robey appeared in five music halls a night, including Gatti's Under the Arches, the Tivoli Music Hall and the London Pavilion.
In mid-December, George travelled to Brighton, where he appeared in his first Christmas pantomime, Whittington Up-to-Date. Pantomime became a lucrative and regular source of employment for the comedian. Cotes calls Robey's festive performances:
"The cornerstone of his comic
art, and the source of some of
his greatest successes".
-- Music Hall Characterisations
During the 1890's Robey created music hall characters centred on everyday life. Among them were "The Chinese Laundryman" and "Clarence, the Last of the Dandies". As Clarence, Robey dressed in a top hat and frock coat, and carried a Malacca cane, the garb of a stereotypical Victorian gentleman.
For his drag pieces, the comedian established "The Lady Dresser", a female tailor who was desperate to out-dress her high class customers, and "Daisy Dillwater, the District Nurse" who arrived on stage with a bicycle to share light-hearted scandal and gossip with the audience before hurriedly cycling off.
With Robey's popularity came an eagerness to differentiate himself from his music hall rivals, and so he devised a signature costume when appearing as himself: an oversized black coat fastened from the neck down with large, wooden buttons.
George also wore black, unkempt, baggy trousers and a partially bald wig with black, whispery strands of dishevelled, dirty-looking hair that poked below a large, battered top-hat.
He applied thick white face paint, and exaggerated the redness on his cheeks and nose with bright red make-up; his eye line and eyebrows were also enhanced with thick, black greasepaint. He held a short, misshaped, wooden walking stick, which was curved at the top.
Robey later used the costume for his character, The Prime Minister of Mirth. The outfit helped Robey become instantly recognisable on the London music hall circuit. He next made a start at building his repertoire, and bought the rights to comic songs and monologues by several well-established music hall writers, including Sax Rohmer and Bennett Scott.
For his routines, Robey developed a characteristic delivery described by Cotes as:
"A kind of machine-gun staccato
rattle through each polysyllabic line,
ending abruptly, and holding the
pause while he fixed his audience
with his basilisk stare."
-- Success in Pantomime and the Provinces
At the start of 1894, Robey travelled to Manchester to participate in the pantomime Jack and Jill, where he was paid £25 a week for a three-month contract. He did not appear in Jack and Jill until the third act, but pleased the holiday crowds nonetheless.
During one performance the scenery mechanism failed, which forced him to improvise for the first time. Robey fabricated a story that he had just dined with the Lord Mayor before detailing exactly what he had eaten. The routine was such a hit that it was incorporated into the show as part of the script.
In the final months of 1894, Robey returned to London to honour a contract for Augustus Harris at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the details of which are unknown.
In September he starred in a series of stand-up comedy shows that he performed every September from 1894 until 1899. These short performances, in English seaside resorts including Scarborough and Bournemouth, were designed chiefly to enhance his name among provincial audiences.
For the 1895 and 1896 Christmas pantomimes, he appeared in Manchester and Birmingham respectively, in the title role of Dick Whittington, for which he received favourable reviews and praise from audiences.
However despite the pantomime's success, Robey and his co-stars disliked the experience. The actress Ada Reeve felt that the production had a bad back-stage atmosphere, and was thankful when the season ended, while the comedian Barry Lupino was dismayed at having his role, Muffins, considerably reduced.
On the 29th. April 1898, Robey married his first wife, the Australian-born musical theatre actress Ethel Hayden (shown in the photograph), at St. Clement Danes church in the Strand, London. Robey and Ethel resided briefly in Circus Road, St John's Wood, until the birth of their first child Edward in 1900.
They then moved to 83 Finchley Road in Swiss Cottage, Hampstead. Family life suited Robey; his son Edward recalled many happy experiences with his father, including the evenings when he would accompany him to the half-dozen music halls at which he would be appearing each night.
By the start of the new century, Robey was a big name in pantomime, and he was able to choose his roles. Pantomime had enjoyed wide popularity until the 1890's, but by the time Robey had reached his peak, interest in it was on the wane.
A type of character he particularly enjoyed taking on was the pantomime dame, which historically was played by comedians from the music hall. Robey was inspired by the older comedians Herbert Campbell and Dan Leno, and, although post-dating them, he rivalled their eccentricity and popularity, earning the festive entertainment a new audience.
In his 1972 biography of Robey, Neville Cardus thought that:
"George Robey was at his
fullest as a pantomime Dame".
In 1902 Robey created the character "The Prehistoric Man". He dressed as a caveman, and spoke of modern political issues, often complaining about the government "slapping another pound of rock on his taxes".
The character was received favourably by audiences, who found it easy to relate to his topical observations. That year he released "The Prehistoric Man" and "Not That I Wish to Say Anything" on shellac discs using the early acoustic recording process.
Robey signed a six-year contract in June 1904 to appear annually at, among other venues, the Oxford Music Hall in London, for a fee of £120 a week. The contract also required him to perform during the spring and autumn seasons between 1910 and 1912.
Robey disputed this part of the contract, and stated that he agreed to this only as a personal favour to the music hall manager George Adney Payne, and that it should have become void on Payne's death in 1907.
The management of the Oxford however counter-claimed, and forbade Robey from appearing in any other music hall during this period. The matter went to court, where the judge found in Robey's favour.
Robey was engaged to play the title role in the 1905 pantomime Queen of Hearts. The show was considered risqué by the theatrical press. In one scene Robey accidentally sat on his crown before bellowing:
"Assistance! Methinks I have
sat upon a hedgehog."
'Hedgehog' is a British slang term for an unattractive woman. It is also used to describe a seductively elusive and promiscuous male.
In another sketch, the comedian mused:
"Then there's Mrs Simkins, the swank!
Many's the squeeze she's had of my
blue bag on washing day."
Robey scored a further hit with the show the following year, in Birmingham, which Cotes describes as:
"The most famous of all famous
Birmingham Theatre Royal
pantomimes".
Robey incorporated "The Dresser", a music hall sketch taken from his own repertoire, into the show.
Over the next few years George continued to tour the music hall circuit both in London and the English provinces, and recorded two songs, "What Are You Looking at Me For?" and "The Mayor of Mudcumdyke", which were later released by the Gramophone and Typewriter Company.
-- George Robey's Involvement in Sport
Off-stage, Robey led an active lifestyle, and was a keen amateur sportsman. He was proud of his healthy physique, and maintained it by performing frequent exercise and following a careful diet.
By the time he was in his mid-thirties, George had played as an amateur against Millwall, Chelsea and Fulham football clubs. He organised and played in many charity football matches throughout England, which were described by the sporting press as being of a very high standard, and he remained an active football player well into his fifties.
Robey became associated with cricket by 1895 when he led a team of amateur players for a match at Turney Road in Dulwich. In September 1904, while appearing in Hull, he was asked by the cricketer Harry Wrathall to take part in a charity cricket match at the Yorkshire County Cricket Club.
Robey played so well that Wrathall asked him to return the following Saturday to take part in a professional game. That weekend, while waiting in the pavilion before the game, Robey was approached by an agent for Hull City A.F.C., who asked the comedian to play in a match that same afternoon. Robey agreed, swapped his cricket flannels for a football kit and played with the team against Nottingham Forest as an inside right.
By 1903 Robey was playing at a semi-professional level. He was signed as an inside forward by Millwall Football Club, and scored many goals for them. He also displayed a good level of ability in vigoro, an Australian sport derived from both cricket and baseball which was short-lived in England.
Two years later George became a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club, and played in minor games for them for many years. He gained a reputation at the club for his comic antics on the field, such as raising his eyebrows at the approaching bowler in an attempt to distract him.
The writer Neville Cardus was complimentary about Robey's cricket prowess, and called him "an elegant player" whose performances on the cricket field were as entertaining as they were on the stage. Although a versatile player, Robey thought of himself as a "medium-paced, right-handed bowler".
Robey was asked to help organise a charity football match in 1907 by friends of the Scottish football trainer James Miller, who had died the previous year. Robey compiled a team of amateur footballers from the theatrical profession, and met Miller's former team Chelsea Football Club at their home ground. The match raised considerable proceeds for Miller's widow. Robey was proud of the match and joked:
"I just wanted to make sure that
Chelsea stay in the first division."
-- George Robey the Violin Maker
In his spare time, Robey made violins, a hobby that he first took up during his years in Dresden. He became a skilled craftsman of the instrument, although he never intended for them to be played in public.
Speaking in the 1960's, the violinist and composer Yehudi Menuhin, who played one of Robey's violins for a public performance during that decade, called the comedian's finished instrument "very professional".
Yehudi was intrigued by the idea that a man as famous as Robey could produce such a "beautifully finished" instrument, unbeknown to the public.
Robey was also an artist, and some of his pen and ink self-caricatures are kept at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
-- High-Profile Audiences
Robey's first high-profile invitation came in the first decade of the 1900's from Hugh Lowther, 5th. Earl of Lonsdale, who hired him as entertainment for a party he was hosting at Carlton House Terrace in Westminster.
Soon afterwards, the comedian appeared for the first time before royalty when King Edward VII had Robey hired for several private functions. Robey performed a series of songs and monologues and introduced the "Mayor of Mudcumdyke", all of which was met with much praise and admiration from the royal watchers.
He was later hired by Edward's son, the Prince of Wales (the future King George V), who arranged a performance at Carlton House Terrace for his friend Lord Curzon.
In July 1912, at the invitation of the impresario Oswald Stoll, Robey took part for the first time in a Royal Command Performance, to which Cotes attributes:
"One of the prime factors in
his continuing popularity".
King George V and Queen Mary were "delighted" with Robey's comic sketch, in which he performed the "Mayor of Mudcumdyke" in public for the first time. Robey found the royal show to be a less daunting experience than the numerous private command performances that he gave during his career.
-- George Robey's Film Debut
Robey's first experience in cinema was in 1913, with two early sound film shorts: "And Very Nice Too," and "Good Queen Bess", made using the Kinoplasticon process, where the film was synchronised with phonograph records.
The following year, George tried to emulate his music hall colleagues Billy Merson and Charlie Austin, who had set up Homeland Films and found success with the Squibs series of films starring Betty Balfour.
Robey met filmmakers from the Burns Film Company, who engaged him in a silent short entitled "George Robey Turns Anarchist", in which he played a character who fails to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
George continued to appear sporadically in film throughout the rest of his career, although never achieving more than a modest amount of success.
-- George Robey in the Great War
At the outbreak of the Great War, Robey wanted to enlist in the army but, now in his 40's, he was too old for active service. Instead, he volunteered for the Special Constabulary, and raised money for charity through his performances as a comedian.
It was not uncommon for him to finish at the theatre at 1:00 am and then to patrol as a special constable until 6:00 am, where he would frequently help out during zeppelin raids.
George combined his civilian duties with work for a volunteer motor transport unit towards the end of the war, in which he served as a lieutenant. He committed three nights a week to the corps while organising performances during the day to benefit war charities.
Robey was a strong supporter of the Merchant Navy, and thought that they were often overlooked when it came to charitable donations. He raised £22,000 at a benefit held at the London Coliseum, which he donated in the navy's favour.
In 1914, for the first time in many years, Robey appeared in a Christmas pantomime as a male when he was engaged to play the title role in Sinbad the Sailor; Fred Emney Senior played the dame role.
Although the critics were surprised by the casting, it appealed to audiences, and the scenes featuring Robey and Emney together proved the most memorable.
During the war the demand for light entertainment in the English provinces guaranteed Robey frequent bookings and a regular income. His appearances in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow were as popular as his annual performances in Birmingham. His wife Ethel accompanied him on these tours, and frequently starred alongside him.
By the Great War, music hall entertainment had fallen out of favour with audiences. Theatrical historians blame the music hall's decline on the increasing salaries of performers and the halls' inability to present profitably the twenty or thirty acts that the audiences expected to see.
Revue appealed to wartime audiences, and Robey decided to capitalise on the medium's popularity. Stoll offered Robey a lucrative contract in 1916 to appear in the new revue 'The Bing Boys Are Here' at the Alhambra Theatre, London.
Dividing his time between three or four music halls a night had become unappealing to the comedian, and he relished the opportunity to appear in a single theatre. He was cast as Lucius Bing opposite Violet Loraine, who played his love interest Emma, and the couple duetted in the show's signature song "If You Were the Only Girl in the World", which became an international success.
This London engagement was a new experience for Robey, who had only been familiar with provincial pantomimes and week-long, one-man comedy shows. Aside from pantomime, he had never taken part in a long-running production, and he had never had to memorise lines precisely or keep to schedules enforced by strict directors and theatre managers.
The Bing Boys Are Here ran for 378 performances, and occupied the Alhambra for more than a year. The theatrical press praised Robey as:
"The first actor of the halls".
George made two films towards the end of the war: The Anti-frivolity League in 1916, and Doing His Bit the following year.
-- Zig-Zag to Joy Bells
Robey left the cast of The Bing Boys during its run, in January 1917, in order to star at the London Hippodrome in the lavishly staged revue Zig-Zag!.
Robey included a sketch based on his music hall character "The Prehistoric Man", with Daphne Pollard playing the role of "She of the Tireless Tongue". In another scene, he played a drunken gentleman who accidentally secures a box at the Savoy Theatre instead of an intended hotel room.
The audience appeared unresponsive to the character, so he changed it mid-performance to that of a naive Yorkshire man. The change provoked much amusement, and it became one of the most popular scenes of the show. Zig-Zag ran for 648 performances.
Stoll again secured Robey for the Alhambra in 1918 for a sequel, The Bing Boys on Broadway. The show, again co-starring Violet Loraine, matched the popularity of its predecessor, and beat the original show's run with a total of 562 performances.
Robey returned to the London Hippodrome in 1919 where he took a leading role in another hit revue, Joy Bells. Robey played the role of an old-fashioned father who is mystified over the changing traditions after the First World War.
He interpolated two music hall sketches: "No, No, No," which centred on turning innocent, everyday sayings into suggestive and provocative maxims, and "The Rest Cure," which told the story of a pre-op hospital patient who hears worrying stories of malpractice from his well-meaning friends who visit him.
Joy Bells ran for 723 performances.
In the Italian newspaper La Tribuna, the writer Emilio Cecchi commented:
"Robey, just by being Robey, makes us
laugh until we weep. We do not want to
see either Figaro or Othello; it is quite
enough for Robey to appear in travelling
costume and to turn his eyes in crab-like
fashion from one side of the auditorium
to another.
Robey's aspect in dealing with his audience
is paternal and, one might say, apostolic."
In the early months of 1919, Robey completed a book of memoirs, 'My Rest Cure', which was published later that year. During the run of Joy Bells he was awarded the Legion of Honour for raising £14,000 for the French Red Cross.
George declined a knighthood that same year because, according to Cotes, he was worried that the title would distance him from his working-class audiences; he was appointed a CBE by George V at Buckingham Palace instead.
On the morning of the penultimate Joy Bells performance, Robey was invited to Stoll's London office, where he was offered a role in a new revue at the Alhambra Theatre. On the journey, he met the theatre impresario Sir Alfred Butt, who agreed to pay him £100 more, but out of loyalty to Stoll, he declined the offer and resumed his £600 a week contract at the Alhambra.
-- George Robey in the Inter-War Years
On the 28th. July 1919, Robey took part in his second Royal Command Performance, at the London Coliseum. He and Violet Loraine sang "If You Were the Only Girl in the World".
A gap in the Alhambra's schedule allowed Stoll to showcase Robey in a new short film. "George Robey's Day Off" (1919) showed the comedian acting out his daily domestic routines to comic effect, but the picture failed at the box office. The British director John Baxter concluded that producers did not know how best to apply Robey's stage talents to film.
By 1920 variety theatre had become popular in Britain, and Robey had completed the successful transition from music hall to variety star. Pantomime, which relied on its stars to make up much of the script through ad lib, was also beginning to fall out of favour, and his contemporaries were finding it too difficult to create fresh material for every performance; for Robey, however, the festive entertainment continued to be a lucrative source of employment.
Robey's first revue of the 1920's was Johnny Jones, which opened on the 1st. June 1920 at the Alhambra Theatre. The show also featured Ivy St. Helier, Lupino Lane and Eric Blore, and carried the advertisement "A Robey salad with musical dressing".
One of the show's more popular gags was a scene in which Robey picked and ate cherries off St. Helier's hat, before tossing the stones into the orchestra pit which were then met by loud bangs from the bass drum.
A sign of George's popularity came in August 1920 when he was depicted in scouting costume for a series of 12 Royal Mail stamps in aid of the Printers Pension Corporation War Orphans and the Prince of Wales Boy Scout Funds.
Neville Cardus, in The Darling of the Halls (1972), writes:
"I think Robey's Mother Goose was, as far
as I know, the greatest piece of acting of
what is called the 'Dame' that I have ever
seen.
But then again his Dame Trot in Jack and
the Beanstalk was great comic acting.
It was incredible. Really a piece of wonderful
acting in a few minutes – acting you would
put on the same plane as you would any
great actor of the time."
The revue Robey en Casserole (1921) was next for Robey, during which he led a troupe of dancers in a musical piece called the "Policemen Ballet". Each dancer was dressed in a mock police uniform on top and a tutu below.
However the show was the first failure for George under Stoll's management. That December Robey appeared in his only London pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk, at the Hippodrome. His biographer, Peter Cotes, remembered the comedian's interpretation of Dame Trot as:
"Enormously funny: a bucolic caricature
of a woman, sturdy and fruity, leathery
and forbidding.
Robey's comic timing was in a class of
its own."
In March 1922 Robey remained at the Hippodrome in the revue Round in Fifty, a modernised version of Round the World in Eighty Days, which proved to be another hit for the London theatre, and a personal favourite of the comedian.
Stoll brought Robey to cinema audiences a further four times during 1923. The first two films were written with the intention of showcasing the comedian's pantomime talents: 'One Arabian Night' was a reworking of Aladdin, while 'Harlequinade' visited the roots of pantomime.
-- Marriage Breakdown and Foreign Tours
One of Robey's more notable roles under Stoll was Sancho Panza in the 1923 film Don Quixote, for which he received a fee of £700 a week. However the amount of time he spent working away from home led to the breakdown of his marriage, and he separated from Ethel in 1923. He had a brief affair with one of his leading ladies, and walked out of the family home.
Robey made a return to the London Hippodrome in 1924 in the revue Leap Year. Leap Year was set in South Africa, Australia and Canada, and was written to appeal to the tourists who were visiting London from the Commonwealth countries.
Robey was much to their tastes, and his rendition of "My Old Dutch" helped the show achieve another long run of 421 performances.
Sky High was next, and opened at the London Palladium in March 1925. The chorus dancer Marie Blanche was his co-star, a partnership that caused the gossip columnists to comment on the performers' alleged romance two years previously. Despite the rumours, Blanche continued as his leading lady for the next four years, and Sky High lasted for 309 performances on the West End stage.
The year 1926 was lacking in variety entertainment, a fact largely attributed to the UK general strike that had occurred in May of that year. The strike was unexpected by Robey, who had signed the previous year to star in a series of variety dates for Moss Empires.
The contract was lucrative, made more so by the comedian's willingness to manage his own bookings. He took the show to the provinces under the title of Bits and Pieces, and employed a company of 25 artists as well as engineers and support staff.
Despite the economic hardships of Great Britain in 1926, large numbers of people turned out to see the show. George returned to Birmingham, a city where he was held in great affection, and where he was sure the audiences would embrace his new show.
However, censors demanded that he omit the provocative song "I Stopped, I Looked, I Listened" and that he heavily edit the sketch "The Cheat". The restrictions failed to dampen the audiences' enthusiasm, and Bits and Pieces enjoyed rave reviews. It ran until Christmas and earned a six-month extension.
In the spring of 1927 Robey took the opportunity to tour abroad, when he and his company took Bits and Pieces to South Africa, where it was received favourably. By the time he had left Cape Town, he had played to over 60,000 people, and had travelled in excess of 15,000 miles.
Upon his return to England in October, George took Bits and Pieces to Bradford. In August 1928, Robey and his company travelled to Canada, where they played to packed audiences for three months.
It was there that he produced a new revue, Between Ourselves, in Vancouver, which was staged especially for the country's armed forces. The Canadians were enthusiastic about Robey; he was awarded the freedom of the city in London, Ontario, made a chieftain of the Sarcee tribe, and was an honorary guest at a cricket match in Edmonton, Alberta. George described the tour as "one of unbroken happiness."
In the late 1920's Robey also wrote and starred in two Phonofilm sound-on-film productions, Safety First (1928), and Mrs. Mephistopheles (1929).
In early 1929 Robey returned to South Africa and then Canada for another tour with Bits and Pieces, after which he started another series of variety dates back in England. Among the towns he visited was Woolwich, where he performed to packed audiences over the course of a week.
In 1932 Robey appeared in his first sound film, The Temperance Fête, and followed this with Marry Me, which was, according to his biographer A. E. Wilson, one of the most successful musical films of the comedian's career. The film tells the story of a sound recordist in a gramophone company who romances a colleague when she becomes the family housekeeper.
By the later months of 1932, Robey had formed a romantic relationship with Blanche Littler (1897–1981), who then took over as his manager. The couple grew close during the filming of Don Quixote, a remake of the comedian's 1923 success as Sancho Panza.
Unlike its predecessor, Don Quixote had an ambitious script, big budget and an authentic foreign setting. Robey resented having to grow a beard for the role, and disliked the French climate and gruelling 12-week filming schedule. He refused to act out his character's death scene in a farcical way, and also objected to the lateness of the "dreadfully banal" scripts, which were often written the night before filming.
-- Venture Into Legitimate Theatre
Until 1932 Robey had never played in legitimate theatre, although he had read Shakespeare from an early age. That year he took the part of King Menelaus in Helen!, which was an English-language adaptation by A. P. Herbert of Offenbach's operetta La belle Hélène.
The show's producer C. B. Cochran, a longstanding admirer of Robey, engaged a prestigious cast for the production, including Evelyn Laye and W. H. Berry, with choreography by Léonide Massine and sets by Oliver Messel.
The operetta opened on the 30th. January 1932, becoming the Adelphi Theatre's most successful show of the year. The critic Harold Conway wrote that, while Robey had reached the pinnacle of his career as a variety star, which only required him to rely on his "breezy, cheeky personality", he had reservations about the comedian's ability to "integrate himself with the other stars ... to learn many pages of dialogue, and to remember countless cues."
After the run of Helen!, Robey briefly resumed his commitments to the variety stage before signing a contract to appear at the Savoy Theatre as Bold Ben Blister in the operetta Jolly Roger, which premiered in March 1933.
The production had a run of bad luck, including an actors' strike which was caused by Robey's refusal to join the actors' union Equity. The dispute was settled when he was included as a co-producer of the show, thus excluding him as a full-time actor. Robey made a substantial donation to the union, and the production went ahead.
Despite its troubles, the show was a success, and received much praise from the press. Harold Conway of the Daily Mail called the piece:
"One of the outstanding triumphs
of personality witnessed in a
London theatre".
Later that year, Robey completed his final autobiography, 'Looking Back on Life'. The literary critic Graham Sutton admired Robey for his honest and frank account, and thought that he was "at his best when most personal".
-- George Robey's Shakespearean Roles
According to Wilson, Robey revered Shakespeare and had an "excellent reading knowledge of the Bard" even though the comedian had never seen a Shakespeare play. As a child, he had committed to memory the "ghost" scene in Hamlet.
Writing in 1933, Cochran expressed the opinion that Robey had been a victim of a largely conservative and "snobbish" attitude from theatre managers, that the comedian was "cut out for Shakespeare", and that if he had been frequently engaged in playing the Bard's works, then "Shakespeare would probably have been popular."
In 1934, the theatre director Sydney Carroll offered Robey the chance to appear as Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, but he initially declined the offer, citing a hectic schedule, including a conflict with his appearance in that year's Royal Variety Performance on the 8th. May.
George was also concerned that he would not be taken seriously by legitimate theatre critics, and knew that he would not be able to include a comic sketch or to engage in his customary resourceful gagging.
In the same year, Robey starred in a film version of the hit musical Chu Chin Chow. The New York Times called him "a lovable and laughable Ali Baba".
At the start of 1935 Robey accepted his first Shakespearean role, as Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1, which surprised the press and worried fans who thought that he might retire the Prime Minister of Mirth.
The theatrical press were sceptical of a music hall performer taking on such a distinguished role; Carroll, the play's producer, vehemently defended his casting choice. Carroll later admitted taking a gamble on employing Robey, but wrote that:
"George Robey has unlimited courage
in challenging criticism and risking his
reputation on a venture of this kind; he
takes both his past and his future in both
hands, and is faced with the alternative
of dashing them into the depths or lifting
them to a height hitherto undreamt of."
Carroll further opined that:
"Robey has never failed in anything he
has undertaken. He is one of the most
intelligent and capable of actors."
Henry IV, Part I opened on the 28th. February at Her Majesty's Theatre, and Robey proved himself to be a capable Shakespearean actor, though his Shakespearean debut was marred initially by an inability to remember his lines.
A journalist from The Daily Express thought that Robey seemed uncomfortable, displayed a halting delivery and was "far from word perfect".
Writing in The Observer, the critic Ivor Brown said of Robey's portrayal:
"In no performance within my memory
has the actor been more obviously the
afflicted servant of his lines and more
obviously the omnipotent master of the
situation".
Another journalist, writing in the Daily Mirror, thought that:
"Robey gave 25 percent of
Shakespeare and 75 percent
of himself".
In any event, such was Robey's popularity in the role that the German theatre and film producer Max Reinhardt declared that, should the opportunity arise for a film version, the comedian would be his perfect choice as Falstaff.
Cotes described Robey as having:
"A great vitality and immense command
of the role. He never faltered, he had to
take his audience by the throat and make
them attentive at once because he couldn't
play himself in."
Although George was eager to be taken seriously as a legitimate actor, Robey provided a subtle nod in the direction of his comic career by using the wooden cane intended for the Prime Minister of Mirth for the majority of his scenes as Falstaff.
The poet John Betjeman responded to the critics' early scepticism:
"Variety artistes are a separate world
from the legitimate stage. They are
separate too, from ballet, opera, and
musical comedy.
It is possible for variety artists to
appear in all of these. Indeed, no one
who saw will ever forget the superb
pathos and humour of George Robey's
Falstaff".
Later, in 1935, Blanche Littler persuaded Robey to accept Carroll's earlier offer to play Bottom, and the comedian cancelled three weeks' worth of dates. The press were complimentary of his performance, and he later attributed his success to Littler and her encouragement.
-- George Robey's Later Career: 1936–1950
Robey was interviewed for The Spice of Life programme for the BBC in 1936. He spoke about his time spent on the music hall circuit, which he described as the "most enjoyable experience" of his life.
The usually reserved Robey admitted that privately he was not a sociable person, and that he often grew tired of his audiences while performing on stage, but that he got his biggest thrill from making others laugh.
He also declared a love for the outdoors, and mentioned that, to relax, he would draw "comic scribbles" of himself as the Prime Minister of Mirth, which he would occasionally give to fans. As a result of the interview he received more than a thousand fan letters from listeners.
Wilson thought that Robey's "perfect diction and intimate manner made him an ideal broadcast speaker". The press commented favourably on his performance, with one reporter from Variety Life writing:
"I doubt whether any speaker other than
a stage idol could have used, as Robey
did, the first person singular almost
incessantly for half an hour without
causing something akin to resentment. ...
The comedian's talk was brilliantly
conceived and written."
In the later months of 1936, Robey repeated his radio success with a thirty-minute programme entitled "Music-Hall", recorded for American audiences, to honour the tenth birthday of the National Broadcasting Corporation. In it, he presented a montage of his characterisations, as well as impressions of other famous acts of the day.
A second programme, which he recorded the following year, featured George speaking fondly of cricket and of the many well-known players whom he had met on his frequent visits to the Oval and Lord's cricket grounds over his fifty-year association.
In the summer of 1938 Robey appeared in the film A Girl Must Live, directed by Carol Reed, in which he played the role of Horace Blount. A report in the Kinematograph Weekly commented that:
"The 69-year-old comedian
is still able to stand up to the
screen by day, and variety
by night."
A journalist for The Times opined that Robey's performance as an elderly furrier, the love interest of both Margaret Lockwood and Lilli Palmer, was "a perfect study in bewildered embarrassment".
Robey made his television debut in August 1938, but was unenthused with the medium, and only made rare appearances. The BBC producer Grace Wyndham Goldie was dismayed at how little of his "comic quality" was conveyed on the small screen.
Goldie thought that Robey's comic abilities were not limited to his voice, and depended largely on the relation between his facial expressions and his witty words. She felt that:
"He should be forbidden, by his own
angel, if nobody else, to approach
the ordinary microphone".
Nonetheless, Goldie remained optimistic about Robey's future television career. The journalist L. Marsland Gander disagreed, and thought that Robey's methods were "really too slow for television".
That November, and with his divorce from Ethel finalised, Robey married Blanche Littler, who was more than two decades his junior, at Marylebone Town Hall.
At Christmas, he fractured three ribs and bruised his spine when he accidentally fell into the orchestra pit while appearing in the 1938–39 pantomime Robinson Crusoe in Birmingham. George attributed the fall to his face mask, which gave him a limited view of the stage.
The critic Harold Conway was less forgiving, blaming the accident on the comedian's "lost self-confidence" and opining that the accident was the start of Robey's professional decline.
-- George Robey in the Second World War
Aware of demand for his act in Australia, Robey conducted a second tour of the country at the start of 1939. While he was appearing at the Tivoli Theatre in Sydney, war broke out with Germany.
Robey returned to England and concentrated his efforts on entertaining in order to raise money for the war effort. He signed up with the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) for whom he appeared in a wide range of shows, and also in his own one-man engagements.
He would sometimes turn up unannounced to perform at hospitals, munition factories, airfields, anti-aircraft posts and other venues where there was an audience of just a few people.
During the 1940's, Robey appeared predominantly in troop concerts as himself, but caused controversy by jokingly supporting the Nazis and belittling black people during his act. His intentions were to gently poke fun at the "Little Englanders", but audiences thought that he was sympathising with Nazism.
George's jocular view that a defeat for Hitler would mean a victory for bolshevism was highlighted in a series of controversial interviews, which caused him much embarrassment when challenged and which he regretted afterwards. His views became known in the press as "Robeyisms", and they drew increasing criticism, but his Prime Minister of Mirth remained popular, and he used the character to divert the negative publicity.
Cotes wrote that:
"Robey was not a politician, merely a
jingoist, who lived long enough to feel
that his little-Englander outlook was
causing him acute embarrassment, and
his army of admirers deep dismay."
Robey starred in the film Salute John Citizen in 1942, about the effects that the war had on a normal British family. In a 1944 review of the film, Robey was described as being "convincing in an important role" but the film itself had "dull moments in the simple tale".
That Christmas, Robey travelled to Bristol, where he starred in the pantomime Robinson Crusoe. A further four films followed in 1943, one of which promoted war propaganda while the other two displayed the popular medium of cine-variety. Cine-variety introduced Robey to the Astoria in Finsbury Park, London, a venue which was used to huge audiences and big-name acts and was described as "a super-cinema".
During the early months of 1944, Robey returned to the role of Falstaff when he appeared in the film version of Henry V, produced by Eagle-Lion Films. The American film critic Bosley Crowther had mixed opinions of the film. Writing in The New York Times in 1946, he thought that:
"It showcased a fine group of British film
craftsmen and actors who contributed to
a stunningly brilliant and intriguing screen
spectacle. Despite this, the film's additional
screenplay was poor, and Falstaff's deathbed
scene was non-essential and just a bit
grotesque."
Late in 1944, George appeared in Burnley in a show entitled Vive Paree alongside Janice Hart and Frank O'Brian. In 1945, Robey starred in two minor film roles, as "Old Sam" in The Trojan Brothers, a short comedy film in which two actors experience various problems as a pantomime horse, and as "Vogel" in the musical romance Waltz Time.
-- George Robey's Final Years
George spent 1947 touring England, while the following spring he undertook a provincial tour of Frederick Bowyer's fairy play The Windmill Man, which he also co-produced with his wife.
In June 1951, now aged 81, Robey starred in a midnight gala performance at the London Palladium in aid of the family of Sid Field who had died that year. For the finale, Robey performed "I Stopped, I Looked, I Listened" and "If You Were the Only Girl in the World". The rest of the three-hour performance featured celebrities from radio, television and film.
The American comedian Danny Kaye, who was also engaged for the performance, called Robey:
"A great, great artist".
The same month, Robey returned to Birmingham, where he opened a garden party at St. Mary and St. Ambrose Church, a venue in which he had appeared at the beginning of his career. On the 25th. September George appeared for the BBC in an edition of the radio series Desert Island Discs for which he chose among others "Mondo ladro", Falstaff's rueful complaint about the wicked world in Verdi's opera Falstaff.
For the rest of the year Robey made personal appearances opening fêtes and attending charity events.
Robey took part in the Festival of Variety for the BBC in 1951, which paid tribute to the British music hall. For his performance, he adopted an ad-lib style rather than use a script. His wife sat at the side of the stage, ready to provide support should he need it. Robey's turn earned the loudest applause of the evening.
The following month Robey undertook a long provincial tour in the variety show Do You Remember? under the management of Bernard Delfont. After an evening's performance in Sheffield, he was asked by a local newspaper reporter if he considered retiring. The comedian quipped:
"Me retire? Good gracious, I'm too
old for that. I could not think of
starting a new career at my age!"
In December 1951, he opened the Lansbury Lodge home for retired cricketers in Poplar, East London; he considered the ceremony to be one of the "happiest memories of his life."
By early 1952, Robey was becoming noticeably frail, and he lost interest in many of his sporting pastimes. Instead, he stayed at home and drew comic sketches featuring the Prime Minister of Mirth.
In May he filmed The Pickwick Papers, in which he played the role of old Tony Weller, a part which he had initially turned down on health grounds. The following year, and in aid of the games fund, he starred as Clown in a short pantomime at the Olympic Variety Show at the Victoria Palace Theatre.
Organisers asked for him to appear in the Prime Minister of Mirth costume instead of the usual clown garb, a request the comedian was happy to fulfil.
-- Sir George Robey's Knighthood and Death
In the early months of 1954, a knighthood was conferred on Robey by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother at Buckingham Palace. However during the following weeks, George's health declined; he became confined to a wheelchair, and spent the majority of his time at home under the care of his wife.
In May he opened a British Red Cross fête in Seaford, East Sussex, and, a month later, made his last public appearance, on television as a panellist in the English version of The Name's the Same.
Wilson called Robey's performance "pathetic" and thought that:
"He appeared with only
a hint of his old self".
By June George had become housebound, and quietly celebrated his 85th. birthday surrounded by family; visiting friends were organised into appointments by his wife Blanche, but theatrical colleagues were barred in case they caused the comedian too much excitement.
Robey suffered a stroke on the 20th. November 1954, and remained in a semi-coma for just over a week. He died at the age of 85 on the 29th. November 1954 at his home in Saltdean, East Sussex, and was cremated at the Downs Crematorium in Brighton.
Blanche continued to live on the Sussex coast until her death at the age of 83 in 1981.
-- Sir George Robey's Legacy
Following his death, Robey's costume for the Prime Minister of Mirth was donated to the London Museum.
In his lifetime, Robey helped to earn more than £2,000,000 for charitable causes, with £500,000 of that figure being raised during the Great War.
In recognition of his efforts, the Merchant Seaman's Convalescent Home in Limpsfield, Surrey, named a ward after him, and the Royal Sussex Hospital later bought a new dialysis machine in his memory.
-- Tributes to George Robey
News of Robey's death prompted tributes from the press, who printed illustrations, anecdotes and reminders of his stage performances and charitable activities. A reporter from the Daily Worked wrote:
"Knighthood notwithstanding, George
Robey long ago made himself a place
as an entertainer and artist of the people."
A critic for the Daily Mail wrote:
"Personality has become a wildly
misused word since his heyday, but
George Robey breathed it in every
pore."
In Robey's obituary in The Spectator, Compton Mackenzie called the comedian:
"One of the last great figures of
the late Victorian and Edwardian
music-hall."
In December 1954, a memorial service for Robey was held at St. Paul's Cathedral. The diverse congregation consisted of royalty, actors, hospital workers, stage personnel, students and taxi drivers, among others.
The Bishop of Stepney, Joost de Blank, said:
"We have lost a great English music
hall artist, one of the greatest this
country has known in the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Performers gave readings at the service, including the comedian Leslie Henson, who called Robey:
"That great obstinate
bullock of variety".
Robey's comic delivery influenced other comedians, but opinions of his effectiveness as a comic vary. The radio personality Robb Wilton acknowledged learning a lot from him, and although he felt that:
"Robey was not very funny, but
he could time a comic situation
perfectly."
Similarly, the comedian Charlie Chester admitted that:
"As a comedian, Robey still didn't
make me laugh, although he was
a legend whose Prime Minister of
Mirth character used a beautiful
make-up design."
Robey's biographer Peter Cotes disagreed with these assessments, praising the comedian's "droll-like humour," and comparing it in greatness to Chaplin's miming and Grock's clowning. Cotes wrote:
"His Mayor, Professor of Music, Saracen,
Dame Trot, Queen of Hearts, District Nurse,
Pro's Landlady, and of course his immortal
Prime Minister, were all absurdities: rich,
outsize in prim and pride, gloriously
disapproving bureaucratic petty officialdom
at its worst, best and funniest."
Violet Loraine called her former co-star:
"One of the greatest comedians
the world has ever known".
The theatrical producer Basil Dean opined that:
"George was a great artist, one of
the last and really big figures of
his era. They don't breed them like
that now."
The actor John Gielgud, who remembered meeting Robey at the Alhambra Theatre in 1953, called the comedian:
"Charming, gracious, and one of the
few really great ones of the music
hall era."
In a decade’s time, an exciting new visitor will enter the Jovian system: ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice. As its name suggests, the mission will explore Jupiter and three of its largest moons – Ganymede, Callisto and Europa – to investigate the giant planet’s cosmic family and gas giant planets in general.
Juice is planned for launch in 2022, and its instruments are currently being perfected and calibrated so they are ready to start work once in space. This image shows one of the many elements involved in this calibration process: a miniature gold-plated metallic model of Juice used to test the spacecraft’s antennas.
Juice will carry multiple antennas to detect radio waves in the Jupiter system. These antennas will measure the characteristics of the incoming waves, including the direction in which they are moving and their degree of polarisation, and then use this information to trace the waves back to their sources. In order to do this, the antennas must work well regardless of their orientation to any incoming waves – and so scientists must figure out and correct for the antennas’ so-called ‘directional dependence’.
This shiny model was used to perform a set of tests on Juice’s Radio and Plasma Wave Instrument (RPWI) last year. It was submerged in a tank filled with water; an even electric field was then applied to the tank, and the model was moved and rotated with respect to this field. The results revealed how the antennas will receive radio waves that stream in from different directions and orientations with respect to the spacecraft, and will enable the instrument to be calibrated to be as effective as possible in its measurements of Jupiter and its moons.
Similar tests, which are technically referred to as rheometry, were conducted in the past for spacecraft including the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn (which operated at Saturn between 2004 and 2017), NASA’s Juno spacecraft (currently in orbit around Jupiter), and ESA’s Solar Orbiter (scheduled for launch in early 2020 to investigate the Sun up close).
The test performed for Juice posed a few additional hurdles – the model’s antennas were especially small and needed to be fixed accurately onto the model’s boom, which required scientists to create a special device to adjust not only the antennas, but also the boom itself.
The model was produced at a 1:40 scale, making each antenna 62.5 millimetres long from tip to tip; scaled up, the antennas will be 2.5 metres long on Juice. The main spacecraft parts modelled here include the body of the probe itself, its solar panels, and its antennas and booms. The model has an overall ‘wingspan’ of 75 centimetres across its solar panels. The photo also shows a spacecraft stand, which extends out of the bottom of the frame. The gold coating ensured that the model had excellent electric conducting properties, and reacted minimally with the surrounding water and air during the measurements.
Meanwhile, the assembly of the Juice flight model has started in September, with the delivery of the spacecraft's primary structure, followed by integration of the propulsion system.
More information: Juice begins to take shape
This model of Juice was built by the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and the tests were performed by the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute in Graz, Austria, as part of a project financed by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The lead scientist for the calibration effort was Georg Fischer of the Space Research Institute, also using computer simulations performed by Mykhaylo Panchenko.
Credits: G. Fischer/IWF Graz
Bodie is a ghost town in the Bodie Hills east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Mono County, California, United States. It is about 75 miles (121 km) southeast of Lake Tahoe, and 12 mi (19 km) east-southeast of Bridgeport, at an elevation of 8,379 feet (2554 m). Bodie became a boom town in 1876 (146 years ago) after the discovery of a profitable line of gold; by 1879 it had a population of 7,000–10,000.
The town went into decline in the subsequent decades and came to be described as a ghost town by 1915 (107 years ago). The U.S. Department of the Interior recognizes the designated Bodie Historic District as a National Historic Landmark.
Also registered as a California Historical Landmark, the ghost town officially was established as Bodie State Historic Park in 1962. It receives about 200,000 visitors yearly. Bodie State Historic Park is partly supported by the Bodie Foundation.
Bodie began as a mining camp of little note following the discovery of gold in 1859 by a group of prospectors, including W. S. Bodey. Bodey died in a blizzard the following November while making a supply trip to Monoville (near present-day Mono City), never getting to see the rise of the town that was named after him. According to area pioneer Judge J. G. McClinton, the district's name was changed from "Bodey," "Body," and a few other phonetic variations, to "Bodie," after a painter in the nearby boomtown of Aurora, lettered a sign "Bodie Stables".
Gold discovered at Bodie coincided with the discovery of silver at nearby Aurora (thought to be in California, later found to be Nevada), and the distant Comstock Lode beneath Virginia City, Nevada. But while these two towns boomed, interest in Bodie remained lackluster. By 1868 only two companies had built stamp mills at Bodie, and both had failed.
In 1876, the Standard Company discovered a profitable deposit of gold-bearing ore, which transformed Bodie from an isolated mining camp comprising a few prospectors and company employees to a Wild West boomtown. Rich discoveries in the adjacent Bodie Mine during 1878 attracted even more hopeful people. By 1879, Bodie had a population of approximately 7,000–10,000 people and around 2,000 buildings. One legend says that in 1880, Bodie was California's second or third largest city. but the U.S. Census of that year disproves this. Over the years 1860-1941 Bodie's mines produced gold and silver valued at an estimated US$34 million (in 1986 dollars, or $85 million in 2021).
Bodie boomed from late 1877 through mid– to late 1880. The first newspaper, The Standard Pioneer Journal of Mono County, published its first edition on October 10, 1877. Starting as a weekly, it soon expanded publication to three times a week. It was also during this time that a telegraph line was built which connected Bodie with Bridgeport and Genoa, Nevada. California and Nevada newspapers predicted Bodie would become the next Comstock Lode. Men from both states were lured to Bodie by the prospect of another bonanza.
Gold bullion from the town's nine stamp mills was shipped to Carson City, Nevada, by way of Aurora, Wellington and Gardnerville. Most shipments were accompanied by armed guards. After the bullion reached Carson City, it was delivered to the mint there, or sent by rail to the mint in San Francisco.
As a bustling gold mining center, Bodie had the amenities of larger towns, including a Wells Fargo Bank, four volunteer fire companies, a brass band, railroad, miners' and mechanics' union, several daily newspapers, and a jail. At its peak, 65 saloons lined Main Street, which was a mile long. Murders, shootouts, barroom brawls, and stagecoach holdups were regular occurrences.
As with other remote mining towns, Bodie had a popular, though clandestine, red light district on the north end of town. There is an unsubstantiated story of Rosa May, a prostitute who, in the style of Florence Nightingale, came to the aid of the town menfolk when a serious epidemic struck the town at the height of its boom. She is credited with giving life-saving care to many, but after she died, was buried outside the cemetery fence.
Bodie had a Chinatown, the main street of which ran at a right angle to Bodie's Main Street. At one point it had several hundred Chinese residents and a Taoist temple. Opium dens were plentiful in this area.
Bodie also had a cemetery on the outskirts of town and a nearby mortuary. It is the only building in the town built of red brick three courses thick, most likely for insulation to keep the air temperature steady during the cold winters and hot summers. The cemetery includes a Miners Union section, and a cenotaph erected to honor President James A. Garfield. The Bodie Boot Hill was located outside of the official city cemetery.
On Main Street stands the Miners Union Hall, which was the meeting place for labor unions. It also served as an entertainment center that hosted dances, concerts, plays, and school recitals. It now serves as a museum.
The first signs of decline appeared in 1880 and became obvious toward the end of the year. Promising mining booms in Butte, Montana; Tombstone, Arizona; and Utah lured men away from Bodie. The get-rich-quick, single miners who came to the town in the 1870s moved on to these other booms, and Bodie developed into a family-oriented community. In 1882 residents built the Methodist Church (which still stands) and the Roman Catholic Church (burned 1928). Despite the population decline, the mines were flourishing, and in 1881 Bodie's ore production was recorded at a high of $3.1 million. Also in 1881, a narrow-gauge railroad was built called the Bodie Railway & Lumber Company, bringing lumber, cordwood, and mine timbers to the mining district from Mono Mills south of Mono Lake.
During the early 1890s, Bodie enjoyed a short revival from technological advancements in the mines that continued to support the town. In 1890, the recently invented cyanide process promised to recover gold and silver from discarded mill tailings and from low-grade ore bodies that had been passed over. In 1892, the Standard Company built its own hydroelectric plant approximately 13 miles (20.9 km) away at Dynamo Pond. The plant developed a maximum of 130 horsepower (97 kW) and 3,530 volts alternating current (AC) to power the company's 20-stamp mill. This pioneering installation marked the country's first transmissions of electricity over a long distance.
In 1910, the population was recorded at 698 people, which were predominantly families who decided to stay in Bodie instead of moving on to other prosperous strikes.
The first signs of an official decline occurred in 1912 with the printing of the last Bodie newspaper, The Bodie Miner. In a 1913 book titled California Tourist Guide and Handbook: Authentic Description of Routes of Travel and Points of Interest in California, the authors, Wells and Aubrey Drury, described Bodie as a "mining town, which is the center of a large mineral region". They referred to two hotels and a railroad operating there. In 1913, the Standard Consolidated Mine closed.
Mining profits in 1914 were at a low of $6,821. James S. Cain bought everything from the town lots to the mining claims, and reopened the Standard mill to former employees, which resulted in an over $100,000 profit in 1915. However, this financial growth was not in time to stop the town's decline. In 1917, the Bodie Railway was abandoned and its iron tracks were scrapped.
The last mine closed in 1942, due to War Production Board order L-208, shutting down all non-essential gold mines in the United States during World War II. Mining never resumed after the war.
Bodie was first described as a "ghost town" in 1915. In a time when auto travel was on the rise, many travelers reached Bodie via automobiles. The San Francisco Chronicle published an article in 1919 to dispute the "ghost town" label.
By 1920, Bodie's population was recorded by the US Federal Census at a total of 120 people. Despite the decline and a severe fire in the business district in 1932, Bodie had permanent residents through nearly half of the 20th century. A post office operated at Bodie from 1877 to 1942
In the 1940s, the threat of vandalism faced the ghost town. The Cain family, who owned much of the land, hired caretakers to protect and to maintain the town's structures. Martin Gianettoni, one of the last three people living in Bodie in 1943, was a caretaker.
Bodie is now an authentic Wild West ghost town.
The town was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961, and in 1962 the state legislature authorized creation of Bodie State Historic Park. A total of 170 buildings remained. Bodie has been named as California's official state gold rush ghost town.
Visitors arrive mainly via SR 270, which runs from US 395 near Bridgeport to the west; the last three miles of it is a dirt road. There is also a road to SR 167 near Mono Lake in the south, but this road is extremely rough, with more than 10 miles of dirt track in a bad state of repair. Due to heavy snowfall, the roads to Bodie are usually closed in winter .
Today, Bodie is preserved in a state of arrested decay. Only a small part of the town survived, with about 110 structures still standing, including one of many once operational gold mills. Visitors can walk the deserted streets of a town that once was a bustling area of activity. Interiors remain as they were left and stocked with goods. Littered throughout the park, one can find small shards of china dishes, square nails and an occasional bottle, but removing these items is against the rules of the park.
The California State Parks' ranger station is located in one of the original homes on Green Street.
In 2009 and again in 2010, Bodie was scheduled to be closed. The California state legislature worked out a budget compromise that enabled the state's Parks Closure Commission to keep it open. As of 2022, the park is still operating, now administered by the Bodie Foundation.
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2 million residents across a total area of approximately 163,696 square miles (423,970 km2), it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the most populated subnational entity in North America and the 34th most populous in the world. The Greater Los Angeles area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second and fifth most populous urban regions respectively, with the former having more than 18.7 million residents and the latter having over 9.6 million. Sacramento is the state's capital, while Los Angeles is the most populous city in the state and the second most populous city in the country. San Francisco is the second most densely populated major city in the country. Los Angeles County is the country's most populous, while San Bernardino County is the largest county by area in the country. California borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, the Mexican state of Baja California to the south; and has a coastline along the Pacific Ocean to the west.
The economy of the state of California is the largest in the United States, with a $3.4 trillion gross state product (GSP) as of 2022. It is the largest sub-national economy in the world. If California were a sovereign nation, it would rank as the world's fifth-largest economy as of 2022, behind Germany and ahead of India, as well as the 37th most populous. The Greater Los Angeles area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second- and third-largest urban economies ($1.0 trillion and $0.5 trillion respectively as of 2020). The San Francisco Bay Area Combined Statistical Area had the nation's highest gross domestic product per capita ($106,757) among large primary statistical areas in 2018, and is home to five of the world's ten largest companies by market capitalization and four of the world's ten richest people.
Prior to European colonization, California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America and contained the highest Native American population density north of what is now Mexico. European exploration in the 16th and 17th centuries led to the colonization of California by the Spanish Empire. In 1804, it was included in Alta California province within the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821, following its successful war for independence, but was ceded to the United States in 1848 after the Mexican–American War. The California Gold Rush started in 1848 and led to dramatic social and demographic changes, including large-scale immigration into California, a worldwide economic boom, and the California genocide of indigenous people. The western portion of Alta California was then organized and admitted as the 31st state on September 9, 1850, following the Compromise of 1850.
Notable contributions to popular culture, for example in entertainment and sports, have their origins in California. The state also has made noteworthy contributions in the fields of communication, information, innovation, environmentalism, economics, and politics. It is the home of Hollywood, the oldest and one of the largest film industries in the world, which has had a profound influence upon global entertainment. It is considered the origin of the hippie counterculture, beach and car culture, and the personal computer, among other innovations. The San Francisco Bay Area and the Greater Los Angeles Area are widely seen as the centers of the global technology and film industries, respectively. California's economy is very diverse: 58% of it is based on finance, government, real estate services, technology, and professional, scientific, and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5% of the state's economy, California's agriculture industry has the highest output of any U.S. state. California's ports and harbors handle about a third of all U.S. imports, most originating in Pacific Rim international trade.
The state's extremely diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast and metropolitan areas in the west to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east, and from the redwood and Douglas fir forests in the northwest to the Mojave Desert in the southeast. The Central Valley, a major agricultural area, dominates the state's center. California is well known for its warm Mediterranean climate and monsoon seasonal weather. The large size of the state results in climates that vary from moist temperate rainforest in the north to arid desert in the interior, as well as snowy alpine in the mountains.
Settled by successive waves of arrivals during at least the last 13,000 years, California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America. Various estimates of the native population have ranged from 100,000 to 300,000. The indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct ethnic groups, inhabiting environments from mountains and deserts to islands and redwood forests. These groups were also diverse in their political organization, with bands, tribes, villages, and on the resource-rich coasts, large chiefdoms, such as the Chumash, Pomo and Salinan. Trade, intermarriage and military alliances fostered social and economic relationships between many groups.
The first Europeans to explore the coast of California were the members of a Spanish maritime expedition led by Portuguese captain Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1542. Cabrillo was commissioned by Antonio de Mendoza, the Viceroy of New Spain, to lead an expedition up the Pacific coast in search of trade opportunities; they entered San Diego Bay on September 28, 1542, and reached at least as far north as San Miguel Island. Privateer and explorer Francis Drake explored and claimed an undefined portion of the California coast in 1579, landing north of the future city of San Francisco. Sebastián Vizcaíno explored and mapped the coast of California in 1602 for New Spain, putting ashore in Monterey. Despite the on-the-ground explorations of California in the 16th century, Rodríguez's idea of California as an island persisted. Such depictions appeared on many European maps well into the 18th century.
The Portolá expedition of 1769-70 was a pivotal event in the Spanish colonization of California, resulting in the establishment of numerous missions, presidios, and pueblos. The military and civil contingent of the expedition was led by Gaspar de Portolá, who traveled over land from Sonora into California, while the religious component was headed by Junípero Serra, who came by sea from Baja California. In 1769, Portolá and Serra established Mission San Diego de Alcalá and the Presidio of San Diego, the first religious and military settlements founded by the Spanish in California. By the end of the expedition in 1770, they would establish the Presidio of Monterey and Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo on Monterey Bay.
After the Portolà expedition, Spanish missionaries led by Father-President Serra set out to establish 21 Spanish missions of California along El Camino Real ("The Royal Road") and along the Californian coast, 16 sites of which having been chosen during the Portolá expedition. Numerous major cities in California grew out of missions, including San Francisco (Mission San Francisco de Asís), San Diego (Mission San Diego de Alcalá), Ventura (Mission San Buenaventura), or Santa Barbara (Mission Santa Barbara), among others.
Juan Bautista de Anza led a similarly important expedition throughout California in 1775–76, which would extend deeper into the interior and north of California. The Anza expedition selected numerous sites for missions, presidios, and pueblos, which subsequently would be established by settlers. Gabriel Moraga, a member of the expedition, would also christen many of California's prominent rivers with their names in 1775–1776, such as the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River. After the expedition, Gabriel's son, José Joaquín Moraga, would found the pueblo of San Jose in 1777, making it the first civilian-established city in California.
The Spanish founded Mission San Juan Capistrano in 1776, the third to be established of the Californian missions.
During this same period, sailors from the Russian Empire explored along the northern coast of California. In 1812, the Russian-American Company established a trading post and small fortification at Fort Ross on the North Coast. Fort Ross was primarily used to supply Russia's Alaskan colonies with food supplies. The settlement did not meet much success, failing to attract settlers or establish long term trade viability, and was abandoned by 1841.
During the War of Mexican Independence, Alta California was largely unaffected and uninvolved in the revolution, though many Californios supported independence from Spain, which many believed had neglected California and limited its development. Spain's trade monopoly on California had limited the trade prospects of Californians. Following Mexican independence, Californian ports were freely able to trade with foreign merchants. Governor Pablo Vicente de Solá presided over the transition from Spanish colonial rule to independent.
In 1821, the Mexican War of Independence gave the Mexican Empire (which included California) independence from Spain. For the next 25 years, Alta California remained a remote, sparsely populated, northwestern administrative district of the newly independent country of Mexico, which shortly after independence became a republic. The missions, which controlled most of the best land in the state, were secularized by 1834 and became the property of the Mexican government. The governor granted many square leagues of land to others with political influence. These huge ranchos or cattle ranches emerged as the dominant institutions of Mexican California. The ranchos developed under ownership by Californios (Hispanics native of California) who traded cowhides and tallow with Boston merchants. Beef did not become a commodity until the 1849 California Gold Rush.
From the 1820s, trappers and settlers from the United States and Canada began to arrive in Northern California. These new arrivals used the Siskiyou Trail, California Trail, Oregon Trail and Old Spanish Trail to cross the rugged mountains and harsh deserts in and surrounding California. The early government of the newly independent Mexico was highly unstable, and in a reflection of this, from 1831 onwards, California also experienced a series of armed disputes, both internal and with the central Mexican government. During this tumultuous political period Juan Bautista Alvarado was able to secure the governorship during 1836–1842. The military action which first brought Alvarado to power had momentarily declared California to be an independent state, and had been aided by Anglo-American residents of California, including Isaac Graham. In 1840, one hundred of those residents who did not have passports were arrested, leading to the Graham Affair, which was resolved in part with the intercession of Royal Navy officials.
One of the largest ranchers in California was John Marsh. After failing to obtain justice against squatters on his land from the Mexican courts, he determined that California should become part of the United States. Marsh conducted a letter-writing campaign espousing the California climate, the soil, and other reasons to settle there, as well as the best route to follow, which became known as "Marsh's route". His letters were read, reread, passed around, and printed in newspapers throughout the country, and started the first wagon trains rolling to California. He invited immigrants to stay on his ranch until they could get settled, and assisted in their obtaining passports.
After ushering in the period of organized emigration to California, Marsh became involved in a military battle between the much-hated Mexican general, Manuel Micheltorena and the California governor he had replaced, Juan Bautista Alvarado. The armies of each met at the Battle of Providencia near Los Angeles. Marsh had been forced against his will to join Micheltorena's army. Ignoring his superiors, during the battle, he signaled the other side for a parley. There were many settlers from the United States fighting on both sides. He convinced these men that they had no reason to be fighting each other. As a result of Marsh's actions, they abandoned the fight, Micheltorena was defeated, and California-born Pio Pico was returned to the governorship. This paved the way to California's ultimate acquisition by the United States.
In 1846, a group of American settlers in and around Sonoma rebelled against Mexican rule during the Bear Flag Revolt. Afterward, rebels raised the Bear Flag (featuring a bear, a star, a red stripe and the words "California Republic") at Sonoma. The Republic's only president was William B. Ide,[65] who played a pivotal role during the Bear Flag Revolt. This revolt by American settlers served as a prelude to the later American military invasion of California and was closely coordinated with nearby American military commanders.
The California Republic was short-lived; the same year marked the outbreak of the Mexican–American War (1846–48).
Commodore John D. Sloat of the United States Navy sailed into Monterey Bay in 1846 and began the U.S. military invasion of California, with Northern California capitulating in less than a month to the United States forces. In Southern California, Californios continued to resist American forces. Notable military engagements of the conquest include the Battle of San Pasqual and the Battle of Dominguez Rancho in Southern California, as well as the Battle of Olómpali and the Battle of Santa Clara in Northern California. After a series of defensive battles in the south, the Treaty of Cahuenga was signed by the Californios on January 13, 1847, securing a censure and establishing de facto American control in California.
Following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 2, 1848) that ended the war, the westernmost portion of the annexed Mexican territory of Alta California soon became the American state of California, and the remainder of the old territory was then subdivided into the new American Territories of Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Utah. The even more lightly populated and arid lower region of old Baja California remained as a part of Mexico. In 1846, the total settler population of the western part of the old Alta California had been estimated to be no more than 8,000, plus about 100,000 Native Americans, down from about 300,000 before Hispanic settlement in 1769.
In 1848, only one week before the official American annexation of the area, gold was discovered in California, this being an event which was to forever alter both the state's demographics and its finances. Soon afterward, a massive influx of immigration into the area resulted, as prospectors and miners arrived by the thousands. The population burgeoned with United States citizens, Europeans, Chinese and other immigrants during the great California Gold Rush. By the time of California's application for statehood in 1850, the settler population of California had multiplied to 100,000. By 1854, more than 300,000 settlers had come. Between 1847 and 1870, the population of San Francisco increased from 500 to 150,000.
The seat of government for California under Spanish and later Mexican rule had been located in Monterey from 1777 until 1845. Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of Alta California, had briefly moved the capital to Los Angeles in 1845. The United States consulate had also been located in Monterey, under consul Thomas O. Larkin.
In 1849, a state Constitutional Convention was first held in Monterey. Among the first tasks of the convention was a decision on a location for the new state capital. The first full legislative sessions were held in San Jose (1850–1851). Subsequent locations included Vallejo (1852–1853), and nearby Benicia (1853–1854); these locations eventually proved to be inadequate as well. The capital has been located in Sacramento since 1854 with only a short break in 1862 when legislative sessions were held in San Francisco due to flooding in Sacramento. Once the state's Constitutional Convention had finalized its state constitution, it applied to the U.S. Congress for admission to statehood. On September 9, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850, California became a free state and September 9 a state holiday.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), California sent gold shipments eastward to Washington in support of the Union. However, due to the existence of a large contingent of pro-South sympathizers within the state, the state was not able to muster any full military regiments to send eastwards to officially serve in the Union war effort. Still, several smaller military units within the Union army were unofficially associated with the state of California, such as the "California 100 Company", due to a majority of their members being from California.
At the time of California's admission into the Union, travel between California and the rest of the continental United States had been a time-consuming and dangerous feat. Nineteen years later, and seven years after it was greenlighted by President Lincoln, the First transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. California was then reachable from the eastern States in a week's time.
Much of the state was extremely well suited to fruit cultivation and agriculture in general. Vast expanses of wheat, other cereal crops, vegetable crops, cotton, and nut and fruit trees were grown (including oranges in Southern California), and the foundation was laid for the state's prodigious agricultural production in the Central Valley and elsewhere.
In the nineteenth century, a large number of migrants from China traveled to the state as part of the Gold Rush or to seek work. Even though the Chinese proved indispensable in building the transcontinental railroad from California to Utah, perceived job competition with the Chinese led to anti-Chinese riots in the state, and eventually the US ended migration from China partially as a response to pressure from California with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
Under earlier Spanish and Mexican rule, California's original native population had precipitously declined, above all, from Eurasian diseases to which the indigenous people of California had not yet developed a natural immunity. Under its new American administration, California's harsh governmental policies towards its own indigenous people did not improve. As in other American states, many of the native inhabitants were soon forcibly removed from their lands by incoming American settlers such as miners, ranchers, and farmers. Although California had entered the American union as a free state, the "loitering or orphaned Indians" were de facto enslaved by their new Anglo-American masters under the 1853 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. There were also massacres in which hundreds of indigenous people were killed.
Between 1850 and 1860, the California state government paid around 1.5 million dollars (some 250,000 of which was reimbursed by the federal government) to hire militias whose purpose was to protect settlers from the indigenous populations. In later decades, the native population was placed in reservations and rancherias, which were often small and isolated and without enough natural resources or funding from the government to sustain the populations living on them. As a result, the rise of California was a calamity for the native inhabitants. Several scholars and Native American activists, including Benjamin Madley and Ed Castillo, have described the actions of the California government as a genocide.
In the twentieth century, thousands of Japanese people migrated to the US and California specifically to attempt to purchase and own land in the state. However, the state in 1913 passed the Alien Land Act, excluding Asian immigrants from owning land. During World War II, Japanese Americans in California were interned in concentration camps such as at Tule Lake and Manzanar. In 2020, California officially apologized for this internment.
Migration to California accelerated during the early 20th century with the completion of major transcontinental highways like the Lincoln Highway and Route 66. In the period from 1900 to 1965, the population grew from fewer than one million to the greatest in the Union. In 1940, the Census Bureau reported California's population as 6.0% Hispanic, 2.4% Asian, and 89.5% non-Hispanic white.
To meet the population's needs, major engineering feats like the California and Los Angeles Aqueducts; the Oroville and Shasta Dams; and the Bay and Golden Gate Bridges were built across the state. The state government also adopted the California Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960 to develop a highly efficient system of public education.
Meanwhile, attracted to the mild Mediterranean climate, cheap land, and the state's wide variety of geography, filmmakers established the studio system in Hollywood in the 1920s. California manufactured 8.7 percent of total United States military armaments produced during World War II, ranking third (behind New York and Michigan) among the 48 states. California however easily ranked first in production of military ships during the war (transport, cargo, [merchant ships] such as Liberty ships, Victory ships, and warships) at drydock facilities in San Diego, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. After World War II, California's economy greatly expanded due to strong aerospace and defense industries, whose size decreased following the end of the Cold War. Stanford University and its Dean of Engineering Frederick Terman began encouraging faculty and graduates to stay in California instead of leaving the state, and develop a high-tech region in the area now known as Silicon Valley. As a result of these efforts, California is regarded as a world center of the entertainment and music industries, of technology, engineering, and the aerospace industry, and as the United States center of agricultural production. Just before the Dot Com Bust, California had the fifth-largest economy in the world among nations.
In the mid and late twentieth century, a number of race-related incidents occurred in the state. Tensions between police and African Americans, combined with unemployment and poverty in inner cities, led to violent riots, such as the 1965 Watts riots and 1992 Rodney King riots. California was also the hub of the Black Panther Party, a group known for arming African Americans to defend against racial injustice and for organizing free breakfast programs for schoolchildren. Additionally, Mexican, Filipino, and other migrant farm workers rallied in the state around Cesar Chavez for better pay in the 1960s and 1970s.
During the 20th century, two great disasters happened in California. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and 1928 St. Francis Dam flood remain the deadliest in U.S. history.
Although air pollution problems have been reduced, health problems associated with pollution have continued. The brown haze known as "smog" has been substantially abated after the passage of federal and state restrictions on automobile exhaust.
An energy crisis in 2001 led to rolling blackouts, soaring power rates, and the importation of electricity from neighboring states. Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric Company came under heavy criticism.
Housing prices in urban areas continued to increase; a modest home which in the 1960s cost $25,000 would cost half a million dollars or more in urban areas by 2005. More people commuted longer hours to afford a home in more rural areas while earning larger salaries in the urban areas. Speculators bought houses they never intended to live in, expecting to make a huge profit in a matter of months, then rolling it over by buying more properties. Mortgage companies were compliant, as everyone assumed the prices would keep rising. The bubble burst in 2007–8 as housing prices began to crash and the boom years ended. Hundreds of billions in property values vanished and foreclosures soared as many financial institutions and investors were badly hurt.
In the twenty-first century, droughts and frequent wildfires attributed to climate change have occurred in the state. From 2011 to 2017, a persistent drought was the worst in its recorded history. The 2018 wildfire season was the state's deadliest and most destructive, most notably Camp Fire.
Although air pollution problems have been reduced, health problems associated with pollution have continued. The brown haze that is known as "smog" has been substantially abated thanks to federal and state restrictions on automobile exhaust.
One of the first confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States that occurred in California was first of which was confirmed on January 26, 2020. Meaning, all of the early confirmed cases were persons who had recently travelled to China in Asia, as testing was restricted to this group. On this January 29, 2020, as disease containment protocols were still being developed, the U.S. Department of State evacuated 195 persons from Wuhan, China aboard a chartered flight to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, and in this process, it may have granted and conferred to escalated within the land and the US at cosmic. On February 5, 2020, the U.S. evacuated 345 more citizens from Hubei Province to two military bases in California, Travis Air Force Base in Solano County and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, San Diego, where they were quarantined for 14 days. A state of emergency was largely declared in this state of the nation on March 4, 2020, and as of February 24, 2021, remains in effect. A mandatory statewide stay-at-home order was issued on March 19, 2020, due to increase, which was ended on January 25, 2021, allowing citizens to return to normal life. On April 6, 2021, the state announced plans to fully reopen the economy by June 15, 2021.
Tools: Contax 167MT, Zeiss 50mm f1.4, Kodak Portra 160. Process and scan by Exposure Film Lab.
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This phrase was coined by one of my favorite writer's, Douglas Coupland... and while it mainly refers to mixing fashion eras and styles, I couldn't help but notice the reflections of the old buildings. Then I started thinking of what that generation of that time would have made of all this...
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60 years ago Feb 9, 1964. Ed Sullivan brought the Liverpool Lads to 73 million viewers. A staggering rating back then. First album here, VeeJay SR-1062. Also Sat morning Beatle cartoons and my 1966 program at the Chicago Intl Ampitheatre concert on Aug 12.
via Painters' Table - Contemporary Art Magazine: Daily Painting Links on Artist Blogs, Painting Blogs and Art Websites ift.tt/1O1QJ6h
For many decades, Kuta beach has been known as one of Indonesia's major tourist destinations. As the opposite of Sanur Beach which facing east, Kuta beach is the west part of Kuta peninsula and famous of its sunset view and also surfing activity.
I was lucky to have several occasion to capture sunset in Kuta beach.
Please do not use this picture for any kind of media for any objectives without my expressed permission.
For decades, the class Vr5 tank engine number 1422 has not puffed with its own power, and this can be seen on its hot plate. Brakes, regulators and the boiler have remained untouched for decades like they were when the 1422 did its final jobs.
On this American day of independence I decided to take chromo and and a bag of cameras and be a tourist in my own (adopted) town.
IN ENGLISH BELOW THE LINE
Vista de la vall del riu Ripoll al pas per Sabadell.
Foto presa amb una Kodak No.3A Autographic Special, model B, fabricada entre el 1921 i el 1934. Placa de gelatinobromur J.Lane Speed Dry Plate, @25; revelada amb HC110 i escanejada amb Epson V800.
Fa decades, segurament més de 50 anys, que la fotografía en plaques de vidre havia passat quasi completament a la historia. Només sembla que en quedava alguna producció puntual (Agfa?) per a fotografia científica especialitzada. L'altra opció, encara vigent però molt complicada és fer-se un mateix les plaques, però ja he vist que millor ni ficar-s'hi. Però fa un parell d'anys, un enginyer nord-americà, J. Lane, decidí vendre les plaques que es feia ell, amb tant d'exit, que s'ha establert l'unic (crec) proveidor de plaques de gelatinobromur del món. Les produeix en moltes mides, des de minuscules de format 35mm, fins a ultra-gran format, com "full plate" o més i tot. Aquestes plaques son "rapides", ja que tenen una ISO de 25 (les altres que té son de ISO 2), i vaig poder fer aquesta foto sense trípode.
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Down there runs the Ripoll river, in Sabadell. In the cliffs of the eastern side began the history of my hometown, with the ancient name of Arraona.
Picture taken with a Kodak No.3A Autographic Special (model B) camera, made in 1921-1934; J. Lane Speed Plate dry plate, @25; developed with HC110 and scanned with an Epson V800.
For decades, probably more than 50 years ago, dry plate photography had gone almost completely into "old" history. It only seems that there was some limited and expensive production (Agfa?) for specialized scientific photography. The other option, very complex is to make the plates yourself, but better not to try. A couple of years ago, an American optical engineer, J. Lane, decided to sell the dry plates he had already made, with such success, that he has established the only (I believe) supplier of dry plates in the World. He produces them in many sizes, from minuscule 35mm format, to ultra-large formats, such as "full plate" or more. But these are his "speed" plates, rated at 25 ASA, so you can take your pictures handeheld.
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I was originally enrolled into the GETTY IMAGES collection as a contributor on April 9th 2012, and when links with FLICKR were terminated in March 2014, I was retained and fortunate enough to be signed up via a second contract, both of which have proved to be successful with sales of my photographs all over the world now handled exclusively by them.
On November 12th 2015 GETTY IMAGES unveiled plans for a new stills upload platform called ESP (Enterprise Submission Platform), to replace the existing 'Moment portal', and on November 13th I was invited to Beta test the new system prior to it being officially rolled out in December. ESP went live on Tuesday December 15th 2015 and has smoothed out the upload process considerably.
These days I take a far more leisurely approach to my photographic exploits, a Nikon D850 FX Pro body as my trusted companion, I travel light with less constraints and more emphasis on the pure capture of the beauty that I see, more akin to my original persuits and goals some five decades previously when starting out. I would like to say a huge and heartfelt 'THANK YOU' to GETTY IMAGES, and the 26.476+ Million visitors to my FLICKR site.
***** Selected for sale in the GETTY IMAGES COLLECTION on January 7th 2019
CREATIVE RF gty.im/1089725374 MOMENT OPEN COLLECTION**
This photograph became my 3,359th frame to be selected for sale in the Getty Images collection and I am very grateful to them for this wonderful opportunity.
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Photograph taken at an altitude of Forty three metres at 11:09am on Wednesday December 26th 2018 off Woolwich Road and Treetops Close in the grounds of Abbey Wood open space in Bexleyheath, Kent, England.
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Nikon D850 Focal length 14mm Shutter speed 1/60s Aperture f/13.0 iso80 RAW (14 bit uncompressed) Image size L 8256 x 5504 FX). Colour space Adobe RGB. Handheld. AF-C focus 51 point with 3-D tracking. Area mode single. Manual exposure. Matrix metering. Auto 0 white balance. Nikon Distortion control on. Vignette control Normal.
Nikkor AF-S 14-24mm F/2.8G ED IF. Nikon EN-EL15a battery. Matin quick release neckstrap. My Memory 128GB Class 10 SDXC 80MB/s. Lowepro Flipside 400 AW camera bag. Nikon GP-1 GPS module.
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LATITUDE: N 51d 29m 15.50s
LONGITUDE: E 0d 7m 51.50s
ALTITUDE: 43.0m
RAW (TIFF) FILE: 130.00MB (NEF 94.5MB)
PROCESSED (JPeg) FILE: 32.00MB
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PROCESSING POWER:
Nikon D850 Firmware versions C 1.03 (16/12/2018) LD Distortion Data 2.017 (20/3/18)
HP 110-352na Desktop PC with AMD Quad-Core A6-5200 APU 64Bit processor. Radeon HD8400 graphics. 8 GB DDR3 Memory with 1TB SATA storage. 64-bit Windows 10. Verbatim USB 2.0 1TB desktop hard drive. WD My Passport Ultra 1tb USB3 Portable hard drive. Nikon ViewNX-1 64bit (Version 1.2.11 15/03/2018). Nikon Capture NX-D 64bit (Version 1.4.7 15/03/2018). Nikon Picture Control Utility 2 (Version 1.3.2 15/03/2018). Adobe photoshop Elements 8 Version 8.0 64bit.
It's been a decade or so since the building where I stumbled across this staircase was owned by Roche. The site was sold to developers and has been partially redeveloped into a "Business Park", As it turns out it's more of a "Leisure Park" (with a swimming centre, trampoline style "bounce", mini golf, hi-tech golf range).
They're now looking at getting the second half of the site rezoned for medium density residential. I was in the heritage listed building (refurbished for offices - still empty) to find out more about the residential development and, as mentioned, stumbled on this.
Brand new camera and had not yet switched on "raw" so it's "straight out of the camera" which is unusual for me (although these days unless it's film it's not really SOOTC).