FAKE VIEWS

We celebrate some of the old photographic fakes that fooled Bristol

WHY YOU SHOULDN’T ALWAYS BELIEVE YOUR EYES

WE thought we’d honour the occasion of April Fool’s Day next Monday with a look at some old photos that were intended to deceive.

Nowadays, anyone with a little knowledge can easily digitally alter photographs. Every day we all look at fashion magazine pictures or photos on adverts in newspapers, magazines and online that have been digitally “improved”. And we don’t even realise it most of the time.

Many people make up pictures, sometimes very obviously, for our amusement or to make some political or social point, on social media every day.

But altering photographs is nothing new; it goes back to well before the digital age. At the most innocent end, most of us have old black and white pictures in the family album that were coloured by some unknown hand many decades ago.

In Communist Russia, there was a whole minor industry in editing individuals who had fallen from favour out of photos of Stalin.

But even in Bristol people were altering pictures decades before Photoshop came along, sometimes for a joke, sometimes to deliberately mislead, and sometimes just to make a picture more interesting.

You might use a computer now, but in past times it took a pair of scissors, a pot of glue, some white paint, black ink and a pen with assorted nibs to make the camera lie. If you wanted to “photograph” a ghost, all you had to do was expose the same plate or film twice, once with a person in it, once without.

Bristol’s undisputed king of faked photos was Fred Little. Fred was a professional photographer who ran a photographic equipment shop where, as what was obviously a profitable sideline, he also sold prints and postcards. Some of these were clearly fakes, or were retouched to make them more dramatic. Many were simply joke images for people to send to friends and relatives to give them a laugh.

So we thought we’d look at some Fakes Before Photoshop … In gathering together this small selection we have used the Post’s own archives, but we’ve also had lots of help from Fred Little enthusiast and collector Gavin Roberts (see www.fredlittle.co.uk).

Bristol Archives have also joined us in the fun, providing some weird and wonderful specimens of their own.

If you want to get some idea of the wealth of images (the vast majority of which aren’t faked!) at Bristol Archives you can search their online catalogue at archives. bristol.gov.uk

Left, this is one of the oddest Fred Little jobs of them all, but it portrays a real event which has long since been forgotten, but which was sensational at the time. While many pioneering aviators – Bleriot, Lindbergh, Amy Johnson and so on – would become household names, no-one now remembers Ernest Willows (1886-1926). And we should, because though he was Welsh, he was educated at Clifton College, so he’s one of ours.

Coming from a well-to-do family, Willows left Clifton at 15 in order to train as a dentist, but instead caught the flying bug and went into the business of building airships.

The picture shows an episode in his record-breaking flight in his second design Willows No. 2, from Cardiff to London, in August 1910.

His plan was to land at Crystal Palace in the daytime to attract as much publicity for his airship (which he was trying to sell to the army and navy), and this meant setting off at night.

He successfully crossed the Bristol Channel to Clevedon, where his father and two mechanics were waiting for him in a car with powerful lights. The idea was that the car would then drive to Bristol and on towards London, and Willows could simply follow it.

Over Bristol, though, he lost sight of the car and hung around over the city for a while hoping to spot it again. He didn’t, and decided to head on using map and compass anyway, though not before accidentally dropping his thermos flask and the supply of biscuits he’d brought to keep him going. He arrived safely in London the following day. (www.fredlittle.co.uk)

A useful reminder that ever since Bristol’s historic High Cross was given away (it’s been at Stourhead ever since) people have regretted it. Here, Fred Little shows us how it would have looked had it been returned to its original location at the crossroads of Corn, Wine, Broad and High Streets. (www. fredlittle.co.uk)

“A bit of old Bristol”. Fred has a little joke about the need to hold up the leaning tower of Temple Church. (Bristol Archives 43207/29/16/8)

Another Fred Little, in a similar vein. “Wine Street – if we get much more rain.” Little did a number of these photos of imagined floods. Sold on postcards, they must have been popular. (www.fredlittle.co.uk)

Above,this picture, courtesy of Fred Little has a photo of a plane carefully cut out and pasted onto another photo of the Gorge. (www. fredlittle.co.uk)

Above: This “flying flirtation” wouldn’t have fooled anyone, but was a bit of fun, probably designed as a Valentine. Dated 1913, it was probably one of a series whose maker pasted the couple in the aeroplane onto different locations around the country. This is Bristol’s Gloucester Road, but there’s certainly one of the same lovebirds overflying Blackpool as well. (Bristol Archives 43207/9/19/13)

Left:“If the rates go much higher. How Wine Street will look.” Fred Little foresees doom if the hardpressed citizens are forced to cough up more in what we now call Council Tax back in the 1920s. (www.fredlittle.co.uk)

Above: “When you see Bristol like this have a soda”. A view of College Green, early 1900s, if you’d had a few too many. This seems to have been made by the Rotary Photographic Company of London, a major supplier of photographic postcards (it seems to have made a lot of its money from pictures of famous actors and actresses). We’re not sure how this one was made, but it’s quite clever, and we’ve come across old newspaper reports of the firm pioneering other “special effects” techniques. (Bristol Archives 43207/15/258)