LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 80, Issue 7181, 27 March 1950, Page 5

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

PIONEER OF PHOTOGRAPHY WHAT PEOPLE READ (By A. L. Astbury.—Exclusive to Te Awamutu Courier) The number of really important inventions whjah were given to the world as a result of a holiday cannot be large. Yet the method used by all photographers to-day to print their pictures was the invention of an Englishman who started thinking the whole thijig out on his honeymoon over one hundred years ago. The inventor was <William Fox Talbot, and an exhibition to commemorate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth has just been opened in Lacock Abbey, his old home in the west of England. Some of the earliest photographs ever taken, in Britain or anywhere else were to be seen in the exhibition. The first of all, a tiny print of a window in Lacock Abbey, taken in 1835, was too delicate to leave its present home in the Science Museum, London, but many others as old—family groups in the strange dress of those days ,pictures of Lacock church and viliage—were examined by enthusiastic crowds of photographers, amateur and professional (including the President of Britain’s Royal Photographic Society) who w’ent to Lacock Abbey to see the exhibition of Talbot’s cameras and photographs . The idea of photography apparently came to Talbot while he was painting in water colours on his honeymoon. It was fashionable in those days to produce water colours as reminders of places one visited; and Talbot thought how much easier it would be if he had some permanent notes of the scenery for finishing his paintings when he got home. And photography as we know it to-day has been the final result.

A Man of Attainments

Talbot was a man of some attainments in other directions. A mathematician, an astronomer, and a botanist, he helped to translate inscriptions found on the site of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, and was the author of the first book illustrated entirely by photographs. Lacock Abbey, which was founded in 1232, and Lacock village itself, are also of outstanding interest. The village one of the loveliest in the county of Wiltshire, was in the possession of the Talbot family for generations, who ensured that its beauties were preserved. And now village and abbey will remain unspoiled for ever, for five years ago both were given by Talbot’s granddaughter to the National Trust, a society which looks after places of great beauty or historic interest in the United Kingdom.

Many other anniversaries are celebrated every year, probably every month, by some association or other in Britain. I notice, for Instance, that this is the centenary year of the foundation of the free public libraries in Britain. There were some free libraries here before 1850—-Warring-ton, in Lancashire, for instance, had its free public library in 1845—but it was in that year that the first Public Libraries Act was passed. Britain now has several hundred libraries; 12 000,000 people borrow books from them regularly, and some 42,000,000 books are available for loan. Books for Boys Such statistics are striking, yet even more interesting are details of what people read. Here we have Mr Parr, a librarian, who for seven years has been studying the reading tastes of boys between the ages of 14 and 18 years in a London club. Some of his findings are surprising. W ( ho remembers the boys’ writer Henty ? Yet the adventure -stories of this nineteenth century war correspondent are still in regular and consistent

demand by boys in London, w’hile the works of Dornford Yates and Rudyard Kipling are quite out of favour. “ Robinson Crusoe,” too, he

says, is not read by boys nowadays, although Kravchenco’s “ I Chose Freedom’’ was “indispensable.” The most popular books of all were those

with a powerful central character such as Sherlock Holmes William ” (the lovable bad boy of a thousand

escapades created by a woman writer), Bulldog Drunnmond (hero of many of “ Sapper’s ” adventure stories), and The Saint (who figures in the crime stories of Leslie Charteris).

Mr Parr said nothing of the technical interests of boys, but I do know that in Britain (as elsewhere, no doubt) they also read books on hobbies, useful arts, radio, television, and model-making. In such practical matters the tastes of boys and men are closer than in the realms of the imagination, and the most sophisticated of grown-ups do not despise ** making things ’ in their spare time. I have come across quite a few examples lately. In Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, Lord Ventry, with one or two friends, is building an airship, a real airship to carry three people, which he hopes will be ready for the Festival of Britain in 1951. In Brixton, in South London 52-year-old Fred Borders has made a model Dakota aircraft with an 11-foot wing-span. Powered by two petrol motors which together develop 14 horse-power, the model flies at 70 miles an hour *at a height of 500 feet. Mr Borders can control it by radio up to a distance of 12 miles, and one of these days he hopes to be able to fly across the English Channel to France. He built it, incidentally, 'on the billiard table of his Brixton home.

Boat-building too, has a wide appeal. In a small back garden at Whitton, not far from London, there is a 17-foot cabin cruiser which one enthusiast has constructed in his spare time, and which he hopes this summer to launch on the river Thames; while in the south London suburb where I live, miles from sea or river, some enterprising person is actually re-fitting a sailing yacht which is on stocks on a obmbed site next to the main road. It seems as if a love of what is now traditionally known over here as “ messing about in boats ” is a part of the United Kingdom character which no amount of difficulties can quell.