Bargain Buy

I occasionally collect old film cameras, mainly from car boot or jumble sales. Charity shops can also throw up the odd bargain, such as this irresistible 1970s Pentax SP1000 with 50mm f2 lens. It is in excellent condition and well worth the ten pond note I exchanged for it at the local British Heart Foundation shop. I used several of these cameras throughout the 1970s and beyond and although I still own them all, they were decidedly knocked about over the years and none work properly any more. I had intended to put a film through over the Christmas holidays, but the weather has been too bad.

The Pentax Spotmatic family of cameras was introduced in 1964, being superseded by the K-series in the mid-1970s, these fitted with bayonet mount lenses. This advert is from Amateur Photographer, issue dated 18 January 1967.

Birds & Dollies

Three Spick & Span Extra covers from the early 1970s.

Shrewsbury

Scanning an old calender of railway posters recently, the one featuring Shrewsbury looked strangely familiar. As it turned out, I had an early 1970s guide book with the same illustration on the cover, although I suspect that the original was done in the 1950s. The artist was Jack Merriott (1901-68), a landscape and portrait painter in both oil and watercolour.

Of Steam and Suspenders

When searching through pictures of vintage pin-ups for inclusion in this blog (it's a tough job, etc.), I try to include something else in the pose. Thus, we have had Amanda climbing a stile, Jayne with her Jag and Fiona Richmond sandwiched between to big blokes and so on.

Sorting through some pictures recently, I came across this. Unremarkable, you may say. Model Jane Fairbanks looking a little distracted whilst disrobing in someone's living room from a 1970s issue of Spick magazine. What caught my eye however, was the record standing next to her right foot. Not just any old record, but a record of the sounds of steam engines, a copy of which I have had in my collection for many years.

The recording of the sounds of steam locomotives at work and subsequent sale on vinyl had been going on for many years, notably by O Winston Link in the USA and Peter Handford in this country. The record in this picture is Memories of Steam, recorded by Kenneth Grenville Attwood on the Longmoor Military Railway in 1969/69 and at Carnforth in the summer of 1968, during the dying days of steam on British Railways.The colour photographs on the cover of the album were by Ian Krause, but are misleading as none of the locations illustrated actually appear on the record itself. Further evidence of the photographer's (or the owner of the room's) interest in railways is the model of a Canadian National locomotive on the shelf behind. It's always nice to combine one's interests!