Decades of wonderful Northamptonshire history
We are proud to present Looking Back - a book written by Chron readers!
We have collated feedback from our popular series of old photographs scanned from our archive of around 30,000 glass negatives and put some nearly 200 of them into a new book.
When we started the Looking Back series in the Chron, we asked readers to supply information on the pictures because over the last 50 years or so the captions had been lost.
If you would like a copy of our book, write to Marketing Department, Chronicle & Echo, Upper Mounts, Northampton, NN1 3HR, giving your name, address and daytime telephone number or email this information to marketing@northantsnews.co.uk. The book costs 12.99 and postage will be a maximum of 1.50.
We wondered whether the project would work but we need not have worried! Readers loved the new Looking Back feature and very soon letters and emails were flooding in with information.
And so we learned that a sleek Mercedes car pictured at a race meeting was actually driven by Juan Manual Fangio and the meeting was the 1954 British Grand Prix at Silverstone. We were able to name the 1954 Miss Battle of Britain!
Perhaps the most amazing story to have come out of the dusty glass plates so far was the heart-warming tale of a little girl, a doll and a father who was feared to have been killed in the Korean War.
We published the picture of father, daughter and doll and very soon had a reply from Gill Cory. She recognised herself aged four in 1953 with the doll her father Ron Clayson had bought her on his release from prisoner-of-war camp.
Mr Clayson served with the Northamptonshire Regiment and fought with the "Glorious Glosters" in the famous battle of the Imjin River in 1951. He was captured and survived brainwashing before being released. The full amazing story is told inside Looking Back.
All the pictures in it have been scanned from fragile glass negatives, the fore-runner of photographic film.
The negatives were donated to the county council in 1978 when the Chronicle & Echo quit its historic Market Square home in Northampton and moved half-a-mile north to new premises at Upper Mounts.
The negatives were used occasionally by historians but had a limited value because very few had any information attached to them. This meant we did not know when they were taken, or why, or who was on the picture.
Then in 1996 the Guildhall Road warehouse where they were being stored caught fire. Incredibly, the negatives were rescued from the heat and most even survived damage from the thousands of gallons of water used to put out the massive blaze.
They were taken to Burton Latimer Library where they stayed in a storeroom for nearly 10 years. The cramped conditions were not ideal so the county council asked the Chron if we would like them back. "OK," we said, "how many are there?"
"Thirty thousand," was the reply!
By an ironic stroke of luck, the Chron had a few years previously switched to digital photography which meant that a former darkroom was lying unused.
This was quickly equipped with shelves to hold the glass plates and, after a gap of 27 years, the negatives returned home.
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