From the archive
Nigel Atherton looks back at past AP issues
5 March 1947
AS FUEL costs and supply shortages wreak havoc on businesses and household budgets in 2022, take comfort from the fact we’ve been here before. Here’s the Editor’s leader from 75 years ago this week. ‘The slowly-gathering fuel crisis, accelerated by the unpleasantly seasonable weather, was upon us too suddenly to allow us to warn readers of the suspension of two successive issues of Amateur Photographer,’ wrote ALM Sowerby, ‘but we hope the publicity accorded in the daily papers to the position of weekly journals as a whole gave all necessary information. Our issue dated February 12th was distributed as usual and this issue is the first since then. So far as we can trace, the only other occasion on which Amateur Photographer has missed an issue since its foundation in 1884 was at the time of the general strike of May 1926, when as now, two issues failed to reach the public. It would be very rash to assume that the resumption of supplies of power to industry will at once put everything back as it was before the shortage of fuel supply became so acute. Goods have been consumed at something like the normal rate while factories have been idle, so there must inevitably be big arrears to make up. That means that the existing shortage of goods will, for a while, be even more acute, and as priority in the use of fuel must of necessity be given to those industries of greatest national importance, it seems likely that factories producing films and papers for amateur photographers will have their fuel-consumption controlled for some time yet.’