The picture which stubbornly refuses to give up its story, Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the 1920s

We all have them in the family collection of pictures.

They are those with no name, or date or any clue as to where they were taken or even what connection they have to the family.

Now this is almost one of those, and I say that because I am pretty sure it will be where my father worked in the 1920s but that is about it.

He had been born in 1906 and as soon as he could he began working with cars and coaches and by degree became a bus and coach driver, which remained his chosen profession from the 1920s till he retired from Glenton Tours in 1982.

By then he was at the prestige end taking passengers across Europe on sight seeing tours as far as the Italian Lakes.

Not for him the grammar school place he had been awarded but instead like Toad in Toad Hall it was the call of the motor car which to a young man in the 1920s had all the romance and sense of adventure which half a century before had been connected with the railway and later to the aeroplane.

None of which quite helps identify the photograph and for that matter the picture itself isn’t much help.

Now I don’t have enough knowledge to date the coach but a check of registration plates confirms that it was registered in Newcastle-upon-Tyne which I suppose is not much of a revelation given that the destination board is also for Newcastle and will have been issued no later than 1932.*

Dad was born in Gateshead on the southern side of the River Tyne and was certainly in London by 1937 which begins to narrow the time frame.  So sometime between the mid 1920s and 1937 he was here.

But where exactly I don’t know and I doubt if it even now exists.  Just one of those small garages in this case beside what was once a private house somewhere in either Newcastle or Gateshead.

That said it is still an interesting image.  The man stares back at the camera leaning on the bonnet of the coach with that rather casual and disdainful pose while just to our right and almost out of our view is a woman half hidden who also is caught looking at the photographer.

And with her back to us is the young child with what look to be full length boots waiting it seems for her mother who has been distracted by the camera man.

The coach is very similar to a model of an early touring coach which had been in the window of Glenton Tours in New Cross from the 1930s till it was deemed a too old and no longer fitted with the sleek new vehicles the form was operating in the 1950s.

And so it went into the back office and from there arrived home as a present which I am ashamed to admit  I slowly trashed but then I was only four.

What I like about this one are the curtains carefully tied back and made of lace reflecting an age of elegance which the plastic blinds of the 1960s and the tinted glass of today cannot match.

To the left is the working bit of picture and just beyond the doors are a collection of cars and coaches.

Now there are other pictures of my father which I take to be from the same period inside a garage which might just be this one.

If so his would have been the daily walk past that old fashioned petrol pump and underneath the large painted signs.

And as he gave his occupation as motor engineer he may well at the time of the picture have been working in the garage.

But that is the limit of what I know which just leaves me with the hope that someone will recognise the place or be able to date the coach.

We shall see.

And of course that will be a bonus for Dad rarely talked about this period of his life and I never asked.

The image had sat in his private collection of pictures for over sixty years and I saw it for the first time only after his death in 1994.

Nor was the original very promising for it was just a negative which was a bit scratched and faded.  But there was enough there to make me curious, and that curiosity has paid off.

I can't date it, or locate it and its significance to our family is unclear but is a wonderful image which captures an ordinary working environment.  I guess it was  taken by an amateur, who was not bothered with the half hidden face of one of the subjects and was equally content to leave the discarded newspaper in the picture.

And yet again it is a lesson in treasuring the family pictures.  It travelled with Dad from Newcastle across south east London to Well Hall Road where he spent the last thirty years of his life.

Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*There are few sites dedicated to the history of registration plates in the UK and this is just one of them, http://homepage.ntlworld.com/johnstonrh/a30a35/regnos/