{"id":1709,"date":"2012-08-25T15:19:12","date_gmt":"2012-08-25T15:19:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1709"},"modified":"2012-08-25T15:19:12","modified_gmt":"2012-08-25T15:19:12","slug":"memories-of-auntie-mabel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=1709","title":{"rendered":"Memories of Auntie Mabel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\u00a9<\/p>\n

There really is probably little reason why most of you reading this should have much interest in my Auntie Mabel, though she was one of my favourite aunts. But I think these pictures have a wider appeal than simply being about a particular person. They were made in 1977 a few weeks before her 85th birthday, using available light and Tri-X or HP4 film, probably pushed a stop or two.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9<\/p>\n

Mabel Marshall was born (as I’m often reminded) on the day that the last train in England ran on the broad gauge lines out of Paddington. The train pulled into Swindon on Friday 20 May 1892 and immediately the engineers got to work on replacing the track with standard gauge, completing the job over the weekend. Meanwhile elsewhere, my grandmother was giving birth. She may well have been aware of the changes taking place to our rail system, as she herself had travelled down those wider lines some years earlier from Wales, where much of her family still lived. And even when I was small, they still used to send a bird – usually a goose –\u00a0 down ready for the table at Christmas, to be collected by one of my uncles from Paddington station.<\/p>\n

Mabel had four sisters and two brothers, all younger than her. The girls were all of the age whose possible husbands were men killed in the First World War, creating a great shortage of men, and only one of her sisters ever married.\u00a0 Mabel, seven and a half when my father was born, as the eldest of the children will have taken much of the responsibility for looking after him and the other young ones, but she never had children of her own – almost 40 when she was married, she was probably by that time too old.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9<\/p>\n

She and my father actually got married within a year or two, not of course to each other, but their partners were also brother and sister, she becoming a Tabor while my own mother, a dozen years younger than Mabel became a Marshall. Her husband had taught the classes at the Richmond and Twickenham Bee-Keeping Association when my father went to learn bee-keeping (later my father was to look after the assopciation’s hives and teach others there.) The two men got on well and introduced each other to their sisters and that I suppose is where my story really starts, though it was perhaps 20 years before I came into it.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9<\/p>\n

Mabel and Alf were married around 1931, and moved into a rather gloomy late Victorian semi-detached in Sunnycroft Road, a large house for two, but it was often rather crowded on the family occasions when we visited. Around 45 years later when I took these pictures, Mabel had been a widow for some years, living there alone.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9<\/p>\n

Even when I was a child\u00a0 in the 1950s it had seemed an old-fashioned house, still lit by gas, when most of the rest of us had long moved to electric. Little if anything had changed by 1977 except that there were now rather more photographs on the stand in the rarely used front room, which include one of my own wedding pictures (fortunately largely hidden) as well as one of my own first son who was with us on our visit.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9<\/p>\n

I knew as I took the pictures that this was probably the last time we would visit the house; life on her own was becoming difficult and before long Mabel would be moving out into sheltered accommodation. The next time we visited she was living in a single room, still with some of the same photographs on display, but otherwise very different (and about 15 degrees Celsius warmer.) I gave her one or two of the pictures, but I think by then her sight had almost gone.<\/p>\n

\"\u00a9
\nAunt Mabel makes us a pot of tea<\/small><\/p>\n

________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

My London Diary<\/a> : Buildings of London<\/a> : River Lea\/Lee Valley<\/a> : London’s Industrial Heritage<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.<\/small><\/p>\n

To order prints or reproduce images<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

________________________________________________________<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There really is probably little reason why most of you reading this should have much interest in my Auntie Mabel, though she was one of my favourite aunts. But I think these pictures have a wider appeal than simply being about a particular person. They were made in 1977 a few weeks before her 85th … Continue reading Memories of Auntie Mabel<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-own-work","category-photo-issues"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}