The way it was
From the dangerous and tragic to the amusing and downright silly, a new book from David Lewis-Hodgson takes us back to the 1960s and ’ 70s. Tracy Calder enjoys the journey
tracy Calder takes us through the dangerous, tragic and amusing photos of David lewishodgson from the 1960s and 1970s
In 1970, four years before the Health and Safety Commission was established, Joe WestonWebb paid stuntman Dave Brookland £55 to drive a family saloon off the edge of a quarry. The already battered Ford Popular had been fitted with wings, a tail-plane and a propeller, but nobody really expected it to fly. It travelled a short distance horizontally and then plunged 100ft into the water (see below). Brookland was trapped in the icy depths for about 45 minutes, surviving off a bottle of compressed air, before being rescued by divers. ‘He just sat there quietly breathing,’ recalls David Lewis-Hodgson, who was sent by LIFE magazine to cover the event. ‘Imagine sitting in a wrecked car at the bottom of an abandoned quarry with about an hour’s worth of air.’
The ‘flying’ car was just one of many stunts organised by Joe Weston-Webb and documented by David. Others featured a group of fearless ladies known as The Motobirds, who rode motorbikes through tunnels of blazing straw bales, and allowed themselves to be fired out of cannons, even if they lost their knickers in the process.
David never set out to be a photojournalist. At the age of 16 he was forced to decide between the arts and science and, with some hesitation, he opted for the latter. ‘I think my parents wanted me to study science, and in those days you were very deferential to the views of your elders,’ he explains. A few years later, he secured a place to study medicine at Charing Cross Hospital in London. ‘I suspect it was because I played rugby,’ he says. ‘ The ability to kick a rugby ball, together with a smattering of Latin and Greek, were at the time considered the most essential requirements for becoming a physician.’ Despite enjoying his studies, the young student still harboured dreams of becoming a photographer, and these feelings intensified when he discovered a book in the bargain box of a second-hand bookshop.
People I Have Shot is an autobiography by Fleet Street photographer James Jarché. ‘I read the whole thing pretty much overnight,’ laughs David. Between
the dull, brown covers Jarché describes the exciting assignments he was sent on, and the famous people he met. ‘ That chance discovery changed my life,’ he smiles. ‘I didn’t want to spend all of my time dissecting cadavers when I could have been travelling the world – it all sounded so glamorous!’
After reading the book David informed the dean at Charing Cross Hospital that his medical studies were over, and promptly applied for a place at Regent Street Polytechnic to study photography. Luckily, he was accepted. The course was rigorous and oldfashioned, and for the first few terms the students used half-plate Kodak View Cameras and were confined to the studio. Photojournalism was finally
‘I didn’t want to be dissecting cadavers when I could have been travelling the world’
addressed in the second year and, being an ambitious sort, David decided to embark on an assignment documenting the seafaring exploits of an eight-man crew aboard a trawler in the North Sea. ‘I wrote to Mac Fisheries and they agreed to let me come out with them,’ he explains. ‘It was easy in those days – you could just phone up the Ministry of Defence, for example, and say “I hear you’re going to blow something up, can I come and photograph it?” and they would say “sure”.’
Unfortunately, David was not a natural sailor and he spent the best part of three weeks hurling the contents of his stomach into the sea. ‘ The boat was pitching around all the time,’ he recalls. The crew relished a snack of flatfish fried in fat then salted and dried, which can’t have helped his constitution much. Despite these challenges he returned with more than 1,000 negatives, mostly shot with a 35mm Miranda. ‘I also took a Linhof Press camera with me, which is probably the worst camera to use on a trawler,’ he laughs. ‘I still have the Miranda – I like to hang on to my old cameras.’
Undeterred by his experience, David eventually went on to complete various assignments at sea, and even learnt to scuba dive, fly and skydive. ‘I was a freelancer,’ he smiles, ‘it was dog eat dog. If you could get a picture that nobody else could, then you had a sale.’
Full of confidence, the young graduate left photographic school expecting to be snapped up by a Fleet Street newspaper. At the time, such papers had 50 or 60 photographers on their books, and so his requests for work were rebuffed. ‘After about 300 knockbacks, I got a job with a North of England news agency,’ he explains. ‘It was a pretty rundown outfit in Lytham St Annes.’ Suitably humbled, David stayed at the agency long enough to learn the ropes and then moved south to establish himself as a freelance press photographer. For the next 18 months, he supplied pictures to the Evening Argus and the Sussex
Express & County Herald. It was a far cry from the glamorous lifestyle he had envisaged while reading Jarché’s book. ‘ The editor would phone me on a Saturday morning and give me a list of events he wanted covered,’ he explains. ‘It was pretty mundane stuff: a bowls match, village play, etc.’ He was often expected to cover as many as 20 events in a few hours. As a result, he became a master of the grab shot. ‘I was quite outrageous really,’ he laughs. ‘I would rush up to the venue, rush in and snap away. It didn’t matter if people were in the middle of something.’ The idea was to get as many faces in the pictures as he could, because every face meant an extra sale for the paper.
Some 12 months later David moved to London, and then Paris, where he secured commissions from the likes of Paris Match, Stern and
LIFE. Much to his delight, the Fleet Street editors who had rejected him a few months before were now eager to have him on their books. ‘When I first started working in Fleet Street, one of the editors told
me about a new pop group who had come down from Liverpool to sign and sell records,’ he recalls. ‘He said that they wouldn’t amount to anything, but I had better go along as they seemed popular with the girls. So I went along and there was only one other photographer there.’ The band, of course, was The Beatles. ‘ They did rather well,’ he laughs. The story prompts David to tell me about another occasion when he met John Lennon. ‘I was working with a journalist who could only be described as “old school”,’ he reveals. ‘He worked for one of the tabloids. We had both been invited to Lennon’s house, so we went along and got chatting with John and Yoko. John asked us what kind of photographs we wanted and the journalist said, “I would like a picture of Yoko making a nice cup of coffee.” The upshot was that we were slung out of the house before I had even got my camera out of the case.’
In 1969, David joined a features agency off Fleet Street, and was sent to Belfast. The 30-year conflict known as The Troubles had just begun and he was charged with bringing back a photographic essay showing how the growing violence was affecting the children there. ‘I didn’t do frontline stuff, I wasn’t working for The Mirror or anything,’ he explains, but over the years, I witnessed many horrific sights. In the 1970s it got much, much worse – it was a dangerous place to be.’ On one occasion he was actually kidnapped; thankfully, he was released when a good friend vouched for him.
Towards the end of the 1970s, David had grown weary of photojournalism and wanted to make some sense of the traumatic events he had witnessed. As a result, he retrained as a clinical psychologist. ‘I no longer wanted to photograph conflict, murder and sudden death,’ he reveals. In our current climate it’s easy to grow nostalgic for what we consider ‘the good old days’, but our memory can play tricks on us. ‘ The 60s wasn’t all about flower power and drugs,’ he confirms. ‘It wasn’t a golden age by any means. There was a huge amount of poverty, we hung murderers and we imprisoned people who tried to kill themselves. During my 20-year career, I photographed much that was good, much that was not so good, and a great deal that was ugly.’