I’M THE BOX BROWNIE BABY!
IT is a precious collection of family photographs which lay undeveloped inside a vintage ‘Box Brownie’ camera for decades.
But the long-forgotten images have finally been reunited with their owners as a result of an appeal by the Scottish Daily Mail.
The images were discovered when photographer Graeme Webb bought a Kodak Portrait Brownie 620 camera for £25 from an Edinburgh charity shop.
He was later surprised to find original black and white photographs on a film inside it – including shots of a baby reclining on a deckchair, a young girl making a tent from the washing in the back garden and a couple posing on some steps.
Others show a baby being cradled in a garden, a girl standing by a wheelbarrow and a group of women in a cafe.
Now the Mail can reveal the camera belongs to the family of Douglas Renton, from Bonaly in Edinburgh.
The camera was donated to the Cancer Research UK charity shop in the Stockbridge area of Edinburgh after Mr Renton’s sister, Lesley Davey, decided to clear out her attic.
Mr Renton, 51, was shocked when he recognised his mother, who passed away in 1999, and his grandmother in the images. He appears in the pictures as a baby.
He said: ‘We were just trying to work out how they’d got out there really. We didn’t know about the camera that got handed in.’ Describing what his family were doing in the photos, taken in the late 1960s, he said: ‘They had just moved to a house in Currie. It was one of the first houses out there so we were just in the garden.’ Mr Renton said it was his sister Lesley who handed the camera in to the charity shop without realising the film was still inside.
His wife, Helen, 48, said: ‘It must have been their grandad’s because he’s not in the photos so he must have been taking them.’
Mr Webb, from Hawick, Roxburghshire, said the model of the camera was first produced in the late 1930s and sold well into the 1970s.