Reeling in the Years

Every year for quite a time my company, based in Hull, Yorkshire, UK,  would produce, for distribution with Christmas cheer , a glossy calendar for the forthcoming year.

I am not sure where the idea came from but it was a bit of shameless publicity for the business packaged up in a useful type item.

We had had on a number of occasions brief flirtations with logo-printed drinks mats, embossed ceramic mugs and also a longstanding sponsorship (my own idea ) with a cycle racing team with screen printed jerseys in a gawdy but eye pleasing cerise, blue and orange.

One of the decision makers amongst us briefly thought about a glamour calendar although that word glamour, in the catalogue of the promotions company we approached was a bit of a code word, and very obvously when we saw the picture proofs, for full scale soft pornography. If you can visualise the term "flesh and fluff" then you are already there.

This idea, to the male contingent of the company, still seemed without fault or reproach although if the calendar ended up as a gift for family and friends or reached the wider general public then there would be consequences.

Of course, Pirelli and other suppliers, in particular to the automotive trade had made a fantastic commercial success of, respectively a beautifully arty representation of boobs and legs or just boobs with grease to such an extent that classic Pirelli's continue to acheive high figures at auction and on second or third, or fourth hand  or more, resale.

We were at the time, after all, a firm of Chartered Surveyors, firmly rooted in serving a local client base and with a certain amount of respectability to uphold.

There was only one possible theme on which the calendars could be based. Nice, black and white depictions of buildings, places and people in our home city and area.

The Calendar Printing Company summoned me to their premises to collect the portfolio of photographs forming part of the extensive collection of a well known local photographer.

I came away with a large plastic folder of prints which represented a huge body of work from 1920 to 1960. They were remarkable and impressive in their own right but even more so to me as I was a relative newcomer to the city and region and I admit, with large gaps in my knowledge and perception of the socio-economic influences at play in what I regarded as my home city.

I just had not realised the breadth and depth in varying proportion of the joy, tragedy, elation and heartbreak of the generations of people that I had come to regard as my own.

The photographs illustrated the status of Hull as a Port and Deep Sea Trawling City with, as far as the eye could see, a mass of commercial ships in the dock basins of the mighty Humber Estuary.

There was a mass of faces loading and unloading every type of freight in the shadow of  vessels from every compass point of the globe or hauling quayside boxes of shimmering ice covered fish from the hazardous North Sea and Arctic regions.

The city buildings were depicted in grandeur in the photographs and confirmed the amassing of wealth from maritime trade and shore based industries although the destruction wreaked through world war and post war demolition and clearance had left very little to be proud of apart from the ability to survive such adversity.

In any brief hard earned leisure  the city population flocked to the east coast resorts of Withernsea, Hornsea and Bridlington. One of my favourite pictures is of very formal, fully clothed adults (there being a distinct absence of children) queuing up on the beach for a cup of tea on perhaps the hottest day of the year.

It was possible for us to allocate a topical photo to every month of the year for the calendar. Winter scenes were of solitary steam engines in the whited-out rural countryside, the spring with scruffy children wading knee high in the flooded slum streets from tidal surge or neap tides (black and white of course), Summers of promenading citizens in the shade or broad leaved Avenues and an autumn of steam threshers and labourers with ruddy complexions.

Collating the calendars became a highlight of our year.

They attained a bit of a cult status and we were inundated with requests from the public at large even though our print run of 100 was barely enough to meet our client base.

In terms of merchandising they could have been quite a money spinner but that was never the intention from the start.

We had planned to continue with the calendar ad infinitum but the printing  company ceased trading and we were not confident enough to trust anyone else with such a project.

In the process of moving office a few years ago I came across a long neglected dusty file which turned out to be the portfolio of photographs from all of those years ago. We had never returned them.

It was a blast from the past to thumb through the images again and with no diminishing of the emotion and pride that they so deserved.