Butlins, Filey, 1963 was our first actual English proper family holiday. Bickering everywhere you looked, soggy food, bossy chilcare, grubby ‘chalets’. Oh dear. We never went again, anyway. We’d been abroad, on aeroplanes, though not on holidays. Troop shipments, we were.
There may have been a hint of optimism in that grin. He was coming out of the Army, after a series of worst nightmare postings, starting with Korea in 1952, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, through Bergen Belsen and Buchenwald and then the engineered civil war in Cyprus.
He’d always taken photographs, throughout all that miasma of chaos and devastation. Didn’t particularly like it when the camera was pointed at him, except when it was handed to my somewhat reluctant mother.
That top one’s probably shot on 127 film, a small bakelite Kodak Brownie, as I recall. He’s holding his treasured Super 8 wind-up cine. Still works to this day although I haven’t been able to face putting a film through it.
This second photo is by the Butlins staffer, taking people completely by surprise, flashes pinging off but really not expecting him to do us, and then realising he was doing everybody. Ah yes, half a crown per print. A lot of money in those days, although doubtless he didn’t get to keep it all himself.
One of this morning’s earliest tweets was from a Photography Symposium-goer whose Father’s Day treat had been breakfast in bed, and on they continued to flow, all day. Men, warmly loved and appreciated by their children, and evidently thrilled with little presents, cuddles, smiles, cards.
I think it was Bea Campbell who said that our birth decade’s fathers, psyches blighted by barely imaginable horrors of war, really weren’t up to the job, and that it would take us several generations to find men capable of more humane and tender parenting than we’d enjoyed. Well, maybe it’s happening sooner than we dared to hope.
Happy Father’s Day, all you generous, beloved, new wave dads. Enjoy!
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