Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Britain's VERY colourful past
Many of us see the ‘olden days’ in black-and-white, says TV historian Dan Snow. But now, in a fascinating series, we bring them vividly to life with photos that have been flooded with all the colour that WOULD have been there the moment the shutter clicke
True lovers of history always see it in the most vivid colour. As a child I could conjure up the brightly painted shields of Harold’s army at Hastings, the visual feast of Henry VIII’s Field of the Cloth of Gold and the gaudy decoration on the stern of a towering 17th-century man-of-war.
I was so lucky my Welsh ‘nain’ (granny) told me stories about the past. There were tales about her early life in India – her memories were of overwhelming colours and smells that she yearned for when she returned to rainy Britain. There were stories about her parents and their parents, stretching back hundreds of years. Characters, events and landscapes were brought alive through her yarns. I now realise that much of it was invented, but her voice made these people and places real. I never felt the past was even past. I felt it was present. These previous generations were like companions.
As I started primary school I began to realise that my obsession with the past was not that normal. I learned that for many people history was in blackand-white. It was jerky films of people who looked so different to us. It was faded, yellowing photos in musty-smelling scrapbooks. The people in those photos were so distant it was as though they had never lived. Literally drained of colour, how could we believe that they had once loved and loathed, experienced ecstasy and despair as we do?
Technology has changed so many aspects of our lives since those days when my nain told us her stories by the fire in her farmhouse. Today we carry around super-computers in our pockets. Just before her death she could video call all of us grandkids, and see her great-grandchildren grow up, using her tablet device. Today our phones give us access to satellite navigation. My children will never know what it is to be lost. Progress has also revolutionised the way we study history. Archives are digitised. You can research your family history without leaving your house. And now, technology has suddenly turned another area of the past upside down. Those black-and-white photos that felt like they portrayed a world less real, can now be flooded with colour – a n d u t t e r ly transformed.
Today and in the next two issues of Weekend, we’ll be using that technology to show you the past as you’ve never seen it before. In today’s stunning 16-page pullout we explore newly coloured images of six aspects of British life from the past century, starting with evocative scenes from our rural history across the first four pages. Two more pullouts will follow, with pictures from times of war, of sporting feats, glitzy celebrities and children at play, to name just a few. By the final instalment on 3 March, we will have taken you through decades of British life – and Forgotten Britain In Glorious Colour will simply change the way you think about history.
This project is so thrilling. It’s only recently that technology has allowed historians and artists to alter photos in this way. Computer software can tease out colour from the shades of grey, and historians can ensure that medals, uni-
forms, hair and eyes are the right colour as described by witnesses at the time or surviving artefacts. People, objects, trees and plants can be rescued from the shadows and reborn as vital and vivid as they were when the shutter clicked and the image was captured.
Images of monarchs and movie stars, posties and porters are transformed by this process and can engage us as never before. Ancient history is now modern. The rest of the world can see the past as colourfully as us history geeks had always imagined it. Forgotten Britain In Glorious Colour is the result of months of hard work by a team of experts. Together we have selected images from the first 80 years of the 20th century, with a few from the 19th century. It’s the period that
‘It will change the way you think about history’
spans the time from when cameras became reasonably portable and widespread, to the advent of colour photography. The photographs were then painstakingly colourised. Every effort has been made to ensure historical accuracy. We chose the pictures carefully too. Hopefully they will inspire memories and nostalgia. Many of them are unseen and have fascinating stories behind them. Looking through the images, I am so struck by what has changed, but occasionally, I am comforted by what has endured.
We have organised the photos into groups with a common theme. Collectively they celebrate a world that could only be British with its Royal Family, rolling green fields, dark satanic mills, eccentricities, love of animals and smiles in the face of adversity.
The Royal Family has probably been the most recognisable family in the world over these decades. I’m thrilled with one picture I’d not seen before, a smiling Queen Victoria. Her friendly face, in colour, transforms our impression of that austere Queen Empress. Until now we have seen her in monochrome, making her blackclad figure the embodiment of a cold, formal, distant past. Now it feels altogether different.
As British as the Royal Family is surely our obsession with pets and animals. There is no question that we have a great love affair with our winged or four-legged friends. You will see lots of elephants, which must have appeared so exotic to Brits, most of whom had never been abroad. A few bulldogs too... and even Churchill with a lion cub. The treatment of animals has changed a huge amount over the 20th century. So too, has the way we worked. The pictures of men and women at work are st r ikingly physical. Boots look like they’ve been worn out, the people are stick- thin, tired and it’s clear the jobs involve proper elbow grease.
Other areas feel more familiar. The eccentricity of our forebears stands out, and I’m pleased to say this feels alive and well today. Inventions that don’t quite work, bizarre races, cheese rolling and conker fights, are as instantly recognisable to us Brits as they would be utterly inexplicable to so many of our foreign friends. People from abroad are often snooty about our weather and beaches. But these pictures show that trips to the seaside or a campsite are enduring parts of British life.
We wanted to make sure there was a balance of the forgotten, the hidden, and also the well known and infamous. No survey of these decades would be
complete without the titanic events of the First and Second World Wars, which altered our society in revolutionary ways. Quite apart from the terrible loss of life, the First World War led to the extension of the vote to workingclass men and, for the first time, some women. The Second World War saw many of our cities terribly damaged and our politics and economy transformed. We know those stories, but these coloured pictures make us think about them in a new way.
It feels like our world today is dominated by sport and celebrity but, as you’ll see, none of this is new. Football has always been an obsession; celebrities spared no effort to get in the papers looking glamorous. Creating a social media presence might feel like a new development but these pictures remind us that there is nothing new about trying to get one up on the competition by looking tougher, richer, more beautiful or like you’re having more fun than your rivals.
Age, social class and geography are ever present in these pictures. Britain was a diverse place even before the arrival of large numbers of people of different ethnicity and religion in the mid-20th century. Many of the pictures reflect that for much of society, life was lived on the streets, as house-
wives with multiple children turfed them out the door to play with their mates in public spaces. Family time was built around meals, usually home cooked, and the wireless. Meanwhile the upper class was living a rarefied existence of servants, shooting parties and socialising.
Many of the pictures look strange to us, and yet the importance of food, eating together, conversation and laughter have not changed so much.
The huge range of wealth and lifestyles is reflected in our landscape. For a small island, with the majority crammed in densely packed cities, we
have a dizzying array of farmland, mountains, rivers and moorland. We have found pictures that show life in the slums but also on the hillside. These pastoral scenes are the last gasp of a way of life that was centuries old. Through them we are able to glimpse a deeper history. One that stretches back
‘It’s clear these people’s jobs involved elbow grease’
to a time before the Industrial Revolution, the train, plane and motor car. They are a bridge to the distant past.
We hope you join us on this journey through Britain’s forgotten history. The images remind me that the people who went before were as real as we are. They struggled, loved and laughed as we do today. It has been too tempting to think about the mistakes of the past and assume that the people must have been ignorant or one-dimensional. I wonder how much of that was because we saw them in these grey images. Now that they’re in colour they seem more believable and intelligent – in short, they seem just like us. The decades we portray in these collections are some of the most revolutionary in our history. We’ve seen terrible wars, new technology, new working practices, the spread of women’s rights and democracy. Some aspects of British life have gone for good – elephants on the streets, an extraordinary disregard for health and safety, and ethnic uniformity. I was sad to see how many pictures featured children larking about in the streets, ponds and fields of Britain. That would be a more unusual sight now. So perhaps not all that change has been positive.
Overall, however, I recognise the cheeky smiles, the crooked teeth, the stoicism, the eccentricity, the strange outfits, the animal obsession and the make-the-best-of-it attitude as things that have endured. The colour has removed a barrier between the present and past, between us and them. History will never be the same again.