Old Photos Found at Flea Markets Make Me Sad

How many times I’ve found them over the years: old photos, scrapbooks and other very personal family memorabilia at flea markets and garage sales.

All for sale, of course.

Their very presence at these venues and the fact that they’re for sale like any other commodity always bothers me so I often ‘rescue’ them. These old photos are (or were or should be) some family’s treasured keepsakes. What are they doing on a dealer’s table, lumped among household goods and other everyday items?

But this latest batch of old photos is unique—they found me, having been passed on after being retrieved from, of all places, the “free store” at Duncan’s Bings Creek recycling centre.

There are eight old photos in total including a daguerreotype, the pioneering type of photo printed on tinplate rather than, as later, paper. Two are mounted on firm card stock backings, one of them, of a family and shot no doubt in the photographer’s studio, qualifying as a “cabinet photo”.

Three appear to be of First World War soldiers during training, based on the obstacle course bridge and boxing gloves. The fifth, of a Royal Canadian Air Force sergeant, and shot in England judging by the car in the foreground and the caption on the back, is of Second World War vintage.

There’s a clue on one of the Kodak envelopes, the handwritten name Violet Graham. She didn’t give her address but check out Duncan Studio’s two-digit phone number. So Violet lived in the Cowichan Valley and I can probably find her in old directories but wouldn’t learn anything more about her or the photos.

All of them were in a generic bubble-wrap manuscript envelope when found at Bings Creek.

Their eclectic mix suggests to me that this particular batch of old photos also has mixed progeny. In other words, someone has gathered them from various sources. The military photos, even though of two world wars, could be related, particularly those of the four soldiers in training. But the hunting photos and daguerreotype, no way. Two of them, of hunting scenes, are from obviously different eras.

The older hunting photo is really faded, unfortunately, but you can make out six men, two holding rifles, and the pelt of a smallish animal hanging from a tree behind them.

The other old photo, this one much clearer, happily, shows three youths posing with a cougar pelt. Better yet, it’s captioned, Jim and Chris. The lad on the left is marked with an X. On the back, which has been torn from a scrapbook making some of the writing illegible, reads, “Gus, my partener [sic] with…and cougar 9 feet tip to tip and Lady.”

There’s what appears to be a hunter’s shanty to the left but none of the boys is holding a gun in the usual pose of mighty hunters so they may be simply posing with someone else’s trophy.

Which brings us to three First World War soldiers’ photos. In the first photo Johnny is perched atop Slim’s shoulders; in the group scene he’s kneeling in the front row, second from the left. Again, because it has been removed from a scrapbook, leaving black album paper clinging to it, the caption is only partially decipherable: “Left to right ‘Harvey,’ ‘Scotty,’ ‘John,’ ‘Grant’ [?], ‘Geo,’ ‘Slo—’.

With no badges or insignia showing there’s no way of identifying them by their unit other than that they appear to be Canadian infantry.

Then there’s the man (John, the common denominator?) balancing himself on what appears to be an obstacle course bridge.

 Likely it was John who mailed these photos home to Canada and a family member (wife, mother) who lovingly pasted them into a family scrapbook. Violet Graham, perhaps? What was John’s full name? Did he and his buddies shown in the photos make it through the holocaust of the First World War? We’ll never know.
          
Any more than we’ll know who removed these particular photos from their album. Or how they came to be mixed with a handful of unrelated old photos in the Bings Creek free store.

Finally, the photo of the airman, a sergeant, doing something to the roof of what appears to be a London taxi. But it isn’t a taxi because here we—almost—strike pay dirt. This time there’s a real caption on the back, one that’s undamaged by removal from an album.

It reads: “Repairing flight commander’s car after bombing raid all glass in garage was blown in  & went thru roof. I was in hotel next door when it happened & it sure kikked [sic] up a heck of a row. Johnny.”

So this one is definitely of Second World War vintage, perhaps during the London blitz.

Did this Johnny too come marching home?   

I can use the cougar photo and those of the soldiers to illustrate my various writings. So they’ll join all the other old photos I’ve rescued over the years, with the exception of one large batch that I bought at the Cobble Hill flea market years ago. One photo bore a name—a very unusual name, a name that I recognized.

A check of the phone directory, a call to the lady listed, a brief description of the photos and I’d found them a home. She had no idea how the old photos which had belonged to a recently deceased relative turned up in a flea market, but she definitely wanted them for her daughters.            

So I packaged them up and mailed them off. I heard no more and it was only later that I realized she hadn’t thanked me.