Arthur COATES, born 27 Jun 1904 in Willington Co. Durham, died 21 Oct 1969 in Willington. He married Cora Lina LONGSTAFF, married 1925 in Durham District, born 1902 in Co. Durham, died 10 Aug 1981. They had 12 or so children, the eldest my father. Arthur and both oldest boys were coal miners, but that is only part of this story.

Arthur’s parents were George William COATES, born cir 1881 in possibly Crook, died ?. and Margaret Hannah LUMLEY. They were married 1901 in Lanchester District. Margaret was born 1883 in Darlington.

Margaret’s parents were Christopher LUMLEY, born cir 1845 in Burnley Lancashire, died ?, occupation carpenter.  He married Ellen MOSES, on 27 Dec 1864 at St. John’s in Darlington. The 1871 census has them in Seaham Harbour, Durham, and the 1891 Census at 22, Chapel Street Darlington, and the 1901 Census at 49, Durham Road, Esh.

Ellen and Christopher’s Children:

i      Eliza LUMLEY, born cir 1866 in Seaham Harbour, Durham, died ?.

ii     Mary LUMLEY, born cir 1867 in Stockton Durham, died ?.

iii    John LUMLEY, born cir 1869 in Stockton, Durham, died ?.

iv   Frances Ellen LUMLEY, born cir 1872 in Seaham Harbour, Durham, died ?.

v    James Christopher LUMLEY, born cir 1874 in Seaham Harbour, died ?.

vi    Thomas LUMLEY, born cir 1878 in Darlington Durham, died ?.

vii   Louisa LUMLEY, born cir 1881 in Darlington Durham, died ?.

viii   Margaret Hannah LUMLEY, born 1883 in Darlington Durham, died ?.  (She married George William COATES, married 1901 in Lanchester District.)

ix  Robert LUMLEY, born cir 1885 in Darlington Durham, died ?.

The barely readable Census listings for Christopher and Ellen Lumley’s family has them living in Frances Street while they were in Seaham Harbour.  According to baby Eliza’s date of birth, they were there from at least 1866 to 1874, so possibly a mere 8 years, maybe a year or so either side, but probably not earlier than 1864 or later than 1878. During this time, Seaham Harbour was at the beginning of its own industrial revolution. However:

The decade from 1871 to 1881 was one of almost continuous disaster for the ordinary people of Greater Seaham. It seems that no sooner was one tragedy over than another began. The Seaham Colliery explosion of Wednesday October 25 1871 occurred at 11.30 pm, otherwise the death-toll of 26 would have been much higher – by now the pit was employing 1100 men and boys. The shock was felt at Seaham Harbour. John Clark, aged 9, sitting on the surface in a cabin near the pit shaft, was blown 10 yards by the explosion. The force of the blast was such that many ponies were killed in their underground stables 1.5 miles away from the epicentre.

And:

A terrible storm occurred on December 17 1872. Newspapers of the time reported that six Seaham-based ships were lost with all hands but unfortunately they gave no names. It may be that dozens of Seaham men went to a watery grave but there is no record of who they were. The sea had not finished yet. On Tuesday June 26 1873 a dreadful boat accident took the lives of five men within hailing distance of the end of the pier…….

Both of those extracts are from one of the pages at Durham Records Online, a magnificent resource, thank you. It’s quite possible that by the mid 1870s the Lumleys had seen enough of all this tragedy. [Look who else was living in Frances Street around the same time? A Judson master mariner.]

Frances Street is named after Frances Anne Vane Tempest, who was married to the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry and recovered her wealth and her Seaham estate after ‘the old tyrant’ her husband died in 1854. Benjamin Disraeli visited her at Seaham Hall in 1861. He wrote:

…on the shores of the German Ocean, surrounded by her collieries and her blast furnaces and her railroads and the unceasing telegraphs, with a port hewn out of the solid rock, screw steamers and four thousand pitmen under her control…she has a regular office…and here she transacts, with innumerable agents, immense business – and I remember her five-and-twenty years ago a mere fine lady; nay, the finest in London! But one must find excitement if one has brains.

Frances Anne died on January 20 1865, well within the time that the Lumleys were in Seaham. Maybe baby Frances Ellen Lumley, born in 1872 in Frances Street was named after this major celebrity of the day, everyone’s paymaster.

So. One of my big projects of 2009 has been St John’s Square and its redevelopment. The Volunteer Arms (in the photograph above) is the only building that remains of Frances Street, the rest having been knocked down to make the library, bus station, Magistrate’s Court, Health Centre in the 1960s, all of which is now being demolished and rebuilt. There are some inspection contacts: the work has mostly been in 35mm. These night photographs taken in the snow are taken from what would have been the top of Frances Street.

And the Volunteer Arms’ gable end, the line of Frances Street:

The teens posed for the camera. Great spot for skateboarding, bmx-ing, rollerblading.

Of course, until today I didn’t know that I’d been standing in what once was the street where my great-great grandparents lived.

And on a completely different note, a Reading newspaper reports a photographer given an ASBO for photographing graffiti.

More St John’s Square from the contact sheets, and a new set in MF when this amazing weather clears and we get back to the diffused northern light we all know and love.

Please do let me know if you think you’re connected to any of these Coates/Lumley/Moses/Longstaff people. The full tree is on the internet somewhere. Or if you know any more about Frances Street and goings on around there in the 1860-70s. We’ll meet for a pint in the Volunteer’s Arms if you do.

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A few days before the holiday began, and a camera fair in Boston Spa was rendered inaccessible by the snowdrift completely immobilising this here damnfool clement-day automobile. The most excellent Mr Cordes from Classic Photographics collected the Durst on my behalf and today we finally installed it. Dug a basic process timer out of the store, attached a new connector for the electricity to said process timer, and it still needs a couple of condensers and some spare lenses of different focal lengths (or light seal blanks) to fit in the lens carousel. It could also do with a fair amount of tlc: a good clean, repairs to the neg carrier and some new rubber bushes to the feet.

Fantastic thing though. The base does a 360 tilt-shift.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll know what these are…?

You do? Wey-hey!

Checklist for producing 5×4 photographs:

- film carriers aka dark slides or DDS (double dark slides)

- black bag or cupboard for loading and unloading them, or head-in-a-sleeping bag might do in an emergency

- pack of sheet film: comes in boxes of 10, 25 and 50. 100s are being phased out but they’re still around. You can get black & white film cheap from China, but Velvia and many types of colour neg are still available.

- beg, buy or borrow a camera. You won’t regret it.

- developing tank & chems for the black and white, and somewhere useful to send the colour neg or slide film. The jury is still out on who can do the best job of this but currently it’s Digitalab in Stepney Bank or Colorworld in North Shields. So far I think RBG in Boro has stopped doing 54. Anyone with better sources or info please let us know.

- enlarger.

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Driving back ‘over the top’ across the North Yorks Moors on a dreadfully blowy, rainy Sunday evening, the first time feeling really cold this year. November 1st. My companion calmly commented on something in the sky. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have seen it through the rain and past the arc of the windscreen wipers.

It looked like the dome of a glow from some illuminated building at first, maybe a football stadium or trading estate. But then we realised it was far, far to big for that, and it was a band, in colours, an arc. And anyway, we were out in the wild, as I commented, in the UK’s equivalent of Area 51 near Catterick Garrison’s training moors. So what could it be? A moon rainbow! A bright full moon was lighting up the hedgerows and fields. The conditions were exactly right.

Lots of speeding 4×4s coming up fast on roads familiar to them, and not much in the way of passing places or laybys, it was hard to find somewhere to stop. We drove slowly on, buffeted by the increasing gale, somewhat dazed and amazed. A tripod would be no good in this weather, unless jammed into something. Minds racing, we turned around in the road, only to be greeted with the sight of a whole, uninterrupted arch right across the road ahead.

Film camera loaded with Agfa 400 ISO colour negative, zipped and hooded firmly into a windproof jacket, camera and body wedged at an angle into the crevice of a dry stone wall. A borrowed 50mm lens at F8, bracketing at 10, 20 & 30 seconds, there was time for four frames before the clouds descended.

This one shows a lump of stone from the wall in the foreground, illuminated from the car’s hazard warning lights behind, and has more colour in the sky. I rather like this one, the oncoming lights of yet another MPV.

They need rescanning, of course. These are just inspection scans and small sizes. I have an offer from a colleague to make some colour darkroom prints at some time in December. We’ll have something better to show then. Probably with prints for sale.

It transpires that a photograph of the moonbow from Richmond made the news that night We were too dazed and emotional to notice. It really was a very moving sight. The Times Online, Daily Mail, The Telegraph.

If you can’t see much of what’s in these photos, maybe try adjusting the brightness on your screen. This could help. The idea is to adjust so that you can distinguish every section one from the other. On my screen the two end blacks are too close to call.

The top two pictures in this post are from my cameraphone, a 2nd gen iPhone. The rest were taken with a trusty Nikon F80 and an old manual 50mm lens and developed & scanned by the delighted and very helpful techie at Asda in Hartlepool, who cleaned the machines when I told him what we’d (probably) got. That F80 performs really well in very nasty weather.Similar Posts:

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Superb explanations from Tim Parkin. He’s in Leeds. And on twitter @timparkin– isn’t everyone?Similar Posts:

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Shot on an big rattling old Mamiya RB with a 6×7 back, to demonstrate some kind of acuity with low key portraits, and hand developed and printed. Shelley is one of the lynchpin soundmakers in the women’s drumming band The Bangshees, photographed only three years ago.

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Released from the tyranny of a prescribed medium, it’s lovely to revisit the easy pleasure of 35mm colour negative film, and keen readers will know that this tends to get processed in the cheapest local minilab, and in one hour. Straight off the boat/bus travel combination, and it’s hard to describe the delightful frisson of anticipation familiar to anyone who uses film, of the moments, hours, sometimes days between delivering the canisters and collecting the developed film.

Schauer is close to frisson but also watery, the needles-on-the-skin feeling of an envigorating yes, shower, or waterfall, so says my Langenscheidts, which spent the week resting lightly and without disturbance on the kitchen table in England. Could be it translates more closely to the Dutch chickenskin – goosebumps. It’s the first time in Germany without a dictionary since childhood, and the immersion felt as comforting as did surrendering independent travel for the safety of a supported visit.

Also there’s schauder – to shudder or shiver, possibly with recognition, and schau – an exhibition or show. Hmm.

My German hosts are some of the most travelled people ever, so they certainly know something about linguistic immersion. (The serenely accommodating Maiers may themselves be the subject of a documentary piece by a local newspaper journalist, who had connected with us via a piece of artwork redolent with Seaham seaside artifacts.)

This family’s photo archive contains a series of small black and white photos of one small child, who ran happily to play skipping games at a kindergarten in Rinteln in the early 50s. There are no photos unfortunately, of Dessau or Wittenberg in the early 1990s, although the associated work diaries and daybooks are in storage somewhere. More to come on all of this, including some interim results from these rolls of film, plus a roll of TMax shot in Stuttgart, to be processed in the darkroom at No 7 in coming days.

The intention behind the photos I hope will represent a feeling of kennzeichnende Bedeutungslosigkeit which is to say almost remote, almost abstract, though pictorial compositions, clean lines and unfussy but with emotional warmth. Possibly it is characteristic insignificance: imbued with meaning, and at the same time free of specific geographical signifiers. Now there’s a dialectic! As often happens, the concept grows with the work. So we shall see. Frisson indeed.Similar Posts:

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Many of my black and white negs look like this. Without the electronica, obviously. Although a cassette or two of Kraftwerk could never go amiss in the darkroom, could it? Astonishing to think that this was made even before Tubular Bells. I’m not linking.Similar Posts:

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Exhibit A: As shot.

The Sage concert and learning halls on the banks of the Tyne in Gateshead is yet another one of those glassy, curvy structures appearing on city skylines all over the world. The Silver Slug as it’s known locally, the external structure is all wavy steel spines. Even its blue-green viewing barrier wriggles and writhes its way through the space.

The top photo is as shot, with a point-and-click GR film camera, on the run. My companion was anxious about his train, but I did think the light was good, so took the chance. Correcting in Lightroom (or Photoshop, or iPhoto), following the grid system, which of the horizontals or verticals would you follow?

Exhibit B: The picture directly above uses the top of the blue-green barrier as it’s nominal straight line. The steel skeleton is no help at all, and neither are the chairs. It’s a wide angle 28mm lens, so there is some keystone distortion, visible mainly in the shapes of the humans, but it’s not too disruptive, or at least not to my eye.

Exhibit C has been straightened against the perpendiculars of the table legs and the visually important spire of All Saints Church across the River.

Which one of these looks straight, to you?

There is a fascinating discussion going on about wonk on Mrs Deane’s blog here. After looking keenly at the exhibits in Street and Studio at the Tate, I’m convinced that for many genres, wonk doesn’t matter at all. The Dutch Angle is big wonk used in cinema to add drama. There’s a copy of The Third Man out on DVD which makes intensive use of the device.

In architectural photography, the intent surely is to make the most of the perspective elements, the position of the horizon, the deliberately vertical uprights in the structure or its surrounds. In these cases, straightness with accuracy is important, isn’t it? And just to show that it can be done:

Exhibit D above was taken with the camera held resting on the table, so there’s more chance that it’s straight, and Lightroom says it’s level against the blue barrier, but it doesn’t look straight, does it? It is possible, even given the challenge the Sage presents. But does it really matter?

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Unfiltered greyscale:

From the top: blue, green, yellow, red.

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