The Machine is the Ghost

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I haven't posted a Holding Time picture for a while, but I think I might be posting quite a few in the near future. I made a start on trying to sort out and tidy up the studio workshop this morning, so I can get all my photography stuff in one safe and dry place, ready for the darkroom build which I'll probably undertake this winter. In parsing out boxes of stuff into relevant category piles, I ran across some boxes of my Dad's old negatives, some (a lot!) of which have never been printed and quite a number that I've never even seen before.

In the photo featured can be seen our original lathe in situ in the Winson Street workshop belonging to my father, later replaced by the one I've got now, and which I've written about in previous posts. I don't know what make the one pictured was, but I could do some digging around - once I get one of the enlargers set up and working, I'll be able to print a decent image from the neg, which will help in identifying it. Judging by what I can make out, the chuck on this machine is the very one I've got as a spare now. Quite a few of the bits in the tray behind the tailstock are with me to this day too.

I have to say that looking at some of the negs gave me goosebumps, as I unearthed pictures of people long dead from my childhood days, bringing to mind forgotten narratives, to some of which I'm the sole living custodian. It really is a curious thing that some of the memories in my head are now shared by no-one else, so I think it's probably incumbent upon me to try and get some record together and to seek the help of the handful of people from the family old enough but still extant and having related narratives; to put some flesh on the bones of it all for the generations following us. Sounds like yet another putative project on the cards...

Addendum: It didn't take too much digging around to find the manufacturer of our first lathe - I found another negative on which I could just determine the name plate on the machine. It was made by S. Holmes of Bradford, probably between the end of the First World War and the early nineteen-twenties, so would already have been a good thirty or forty years old when Dad got hold of it.

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