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chapter one 1960s
by keith waldegrave
I never consciously wanted to be a photographer, it happened rather by accident. I was 17 years old and about to leave school with no clue about what I might do? A degree of skill in art and technical drawing, probably embedded in my genes, suggested maybe a career in a drawing office but fate intervened at the eleventh hour. I responded to an ad in the local paper and I landed a job as a trainee photographer with the Kentish Express in Ashford, my hometown.
The paper’s photographic department was what, I imagine, must once have been a first floor flat now above the garage where the delivery vans were housed. It was pretty squalid. The room where we developed films especially so. This was where we made tea or heated up baked beans for our lunch on a gas ring which also doubled as the means for drying our films hanging from a washing line close by. The other rooms were a basic darkroom for printing, a ‘sitting room’ cum occasional studio and a finishing room where we trimmed and glazed prints and stored negatives.
It was the usual fare for a local weekly newspaper. Village fetes, flower shows, Rotary Club dinners and amateur dramatic theatre productions etc., but applying a little creativity was the challenge. I was fortunate to have a talented chief photographer, ‘Shad’, Denis Shadbolt (he later changed his name to Shadwell!). He was full of bullshit but I certainly learned a lot from him. His mantra was to always shoot with available light. Flash as a last resort but even then preferably bounced off a wall or ceiling to give diffused light (I subsequently worked with a guy who developed a technique for bouncing flash off the top of his bald head!). Never direct flash if it could be avoided.
The company’s camera kit was truly archaic. I was given a museum piece made in London at the beginning of the twentieth century. A VN (Van Neck) press plate camera in the first instance and later a Speed Graphic both using 9 x 12 cm glass plates. The VN was very basic with no focussing aid and both cameras were extremely slow to use since you had to insert a plate (preloaded in it’s holder) cock the shutter, remove the darkslide before making your single exposure, return the darkslide, remove the holder and then repeat for each picture. I was laborious but very good discipline and certainly made you think carefully about making every exposure count.
I graduated to the heavy Speed Graphic with it’s equally heavy glass plates and six months into my apprenticeship thus equipped I took the train from home in Ashford to Herne Hill velodrome in south London for the 1963 Good Friday meeting.
At this point in my life I was a spotty teenage time-trialist. Cycling, my all-consuming passion, was now threatened by the erratic, unpredictable working life of a press photographer – not to mention being led astray by seasoned hacks and the discovery of girls and beer!
The most famous British cyclist at this time was Tommy Simpson who was riding in a motor-paced event at the Herne Hill track. I managed a pretty fine picture from that day considering my inexperience and six glass plates still survive.
‘Shad’ used his own Rolleiflex camera as did the only other photographer. There was no suggestion of being provided with more modern equipment. If I wanted anything better I would have to buy it myself. A twin lens reflex was generally the preferred camera at the time. I bought the only camera of it’s type I could afford, a Semflex, the French made poor man’s Rollei and later upgraded to the entry level Rollei T. But at least I was now using 120mm film both easier to load into the camera and to process. Twelve shots on a roll. What a joy!
The early 60s were exciting times for a teenager after the deprivation of the post war years. Things were really starting to look up. Music and the emergence of rock n roll, America soul and R&B were hugely important to me and my school friends and the easy access to artists, often relatively unknown ones, from the States.
I put my newly acquired Rolleiflex to good use at Tofts night club in Folkestone shooting Little Richard in action just a few feet away. No heavy security to make life difficult. I filled the frame and bounced flash off the ceiling showing the beads of perspiration on his brow as he sang “Good Golly Miss Molly”. Another picture from that era I’m quite proud of.
The paper paid for my driving lessons before letting me loose in the company’s red, white and black “Kentish Express” liveried vans around the Kent countryside. They were used twice weekly for night time distribution of the two titles produce by the KE. The rest of the time they were driven by reporters and photographers unladen. Light and none too stable, especially in the hands of the young and reckless, they were sometimes used to transport beer and firewood for beach barbecues occasionally ending up in a ditch on Romney Marsh.
A picture I’m most proud of from my KE days is James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 from the film ‘Goldfinger’. Following the film’s promotional tour of Europe in 1965 it was flown into Ferryfield Airport at Lydd. The DB5’s smokescreen generating device was kicked into action for a dramatic photocall. The picture ran across a half page in that week’s paper.
A year later at the end of my three-year apprenticeship I was off. I always knew I’d leave as soon as I could. I did! My escalating wanderlust and my embryonic photographic career coincided and evolved. I would subsequently travel the world as a professional photographer for the rest of my working life.
In the meantime I had been seduced by David Bailey, the enfant terrible of 60s fashion photography and his endorsement of the Asahi Pentax 35mm single lens reflex. The “Just hold a Pentax” ad hit the spot. It did, indeed, feel like you could create magic with it. I bought myself a second hand S1A but was still clinging on to the Rollei for the excellent quality produced by two-and-a- quarter square.
I resigned in the summer of 1966 packed my Pentax, with wide angle and short telephoto lenses and the Rollei and spent two months hitch-hiking around Europe with my old school friend Steve Richards. A four-thousand mile road trip in other people’s cars. Then a brief spell with the opposition Kent Messenger, before another serendipitous moment led me to the soon-to-be-launched Evening Echo based in Hemel Hempstead and another staff job.
Not for the first time in my career I found myself working for a newspaper that didn’t, as yet, exist. The Echo and it’s sister paper, the Evening Post, were new and exciting newspapers attracting a young and creative workforce. Clean web offset reproduction and creative picture presentation in a broadsheet paper were both stimulating and satisfying for an ambitious photographer. We were actively encouraged to think ‘outside the box’ and produce the most imaginative pictures.
It was a similar menu to a weekly paper but a step up and more intense with a daily deadline six days a week. Everything was that bit more professional. Each photographer was issued with their own kit. A Canon FT QL 35mm SLR with 35mm, 50mm, 135 mm lenses and a Mecablitz 45 CL-4 flashgun. There was also a 400 mm Novoflex telephoto lens with it’s pistol-grip focussing for those Watford FC’s matches we covered both home and away, travelling all over the country and an off-season friendly tour to Malta too.
I now drove a Vauxhall Viva, from a pool of cars at our disposal, to my various assignments around south west Hertfordshire. No longer an Austin A55 van with nothing in the back but my camera bag. Me and my colleagues were mostly in our early twenties but no less reckless!
A large number of showbiz personalities lived in Hertfordshire with its easy access to London’s TV studios and theatre venues and film studios at Elstree. They were often willing to oblige a local paper with an interview and pictures. In addition to local news stories our features assignments often took us to places outside our circulation area including the occasional foreign assignment.
In the three years I worked for the Kentish Express I can barely recall any story I covered relating to the sea, shipping or anything remotely nautical despite our circulation area covering most of the county’s 350 mile coastline. Then during my time at the Echo in Hertfordshire, a landlocked county, I covered three Channel swims. Kevin Murphy was a journalist colleague on the Echo and his marathon 36 hour two-way swim was probably the
most memorable. I spent a lot of time in the water with him shooting on an underwater camera. He subsequently swam the channel 34 times!
It was another channel swim in the summer of 1969, however, which provided one of my favourite pictures from Echo days. Elaine Gray’s attempt came to an end mid-channel but not before a bizarre mid-ocean argument with her official observer. They both trod water for what seemed like an hour while I swam round them shooting pictures on an underwater camera. A channel ferry passing close by provided a dramatic backdrop. Unfortunately, Elaine grew too cold to continue and despite having been on schedule for a record-breaking crossing she gave up.
As the 60s gave way to the 70s I knew it was only a matter of time before my wanderlust got the better of me. I was enjoying life on the Echo but I was getting my taste of adventure in my own time. I drove to Istanbul through Communist Hungary and Bulgaria, and back, for a two-week holiday with like-minded friends.
On another occasion, a long-haul road trip across France, Spain and through the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Somewhere near Ouarzazate on the edge of the Sahara while photographing a nomadic Berber family we were invited to share their cous-cous from a communal pot – and just the one spoon!
This was a dummy run in my VW Combi and a taste of the sort of adventures I hoped to experience on my overland trip across Asia in the not too distant future. It would come to pass in the winter of 1973/74.
