These pages are from an evocative little photograph album which the compiler has helpfully dated Swanwick 1925 in a large neatly drawn sticker inside. Each page then has a caption, again neatly drawn in ink. The station was not hard to identify once the snap was taken out of the album, and the sign for Butterley was revealed in full. Remarkably this is now a preserved site just outside the town of Ripley, so has not changed an awful lot, and you can still catch a steam engine there some days (though shockingly much of the iron works across the road, where St. Pancras was cast, has been demolished in recent years).
The owner was part of an organised tennis club trip to a nearby country house amateur tournament. They were taken on a snapshot camera, which does show the limitations of the lens – the sharpness really drops off at the edges of the frame. They may even have been developed by a keen amateur at home, then re are scratches across some frames and even some finger print marks from carelessness with the fixer. Yet there is a real sense of documentary about the way the album opens with an Outward Bound shot, and the last page is a shot of the station platform with the crowd waiting to board the steam train, taken from the bridge. The actual tennis shots are fairly dull and not very clear, but it obviously meant a lot to the owner, who even took a snap of a more professionally equipped photographer with a camera on a tripod. I wonder where his album went?
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