I’ve been a bit quiet on here of late. My apologies but summer chores in the garden seem to be never ending at the moment and I also seem to be running around after mum rather a lot. Hopefully the autumn will see me being able to get back to more pressing matters on the website. Correction …. autumn WILL see me getting back to the website as I will be putting my foot down over having at least one day to myself again.
I’ve certainly got a lot of work lined up for the autumn and winter where the website is concerned with the various submissions and more recent acquisitions for the archive. I thought I’d have a quick round-up of what I will be working on and what will be appearing on the website in the coming months. I took a carrier bag full of cine footage of the Broads over to the lovely Keiron Gray at Video Impact in Loddon for transfer. I must say a massive thank you to Keiron who is very generously digitising these films for Broadland Memories without charge. This really is an enormous help as I am running the archive on such limited funds. I did feel somewhat embarrassed by the amount of films I had amassed to take over to him! They contain the last two films from the Vardy family collection plus a couple of films from the 1970s and three from the 1960s.
Two of those films were more recent purchases. Since June of this year I have managed to buy a very nice reel of amateur film from 1962 which is around 20 minutes in length, plus more amateur footage of Broadland from 1979. In the last month I was also able to bid on a photograph album which contains around 100 images of the Norfolk Broads taken by a couple during their holidays afloat in the 1950s. These have been scanned now and I’ll start working on them soon – more info on those soon but here is a taster.
As regular readers will be aware, my appeal for donations for the immediate and ongoing costs associated with running Broadland Memories brought in about £360 in the end. I put £300 of that towards the purchase of a new computer and upgrades of software that I needed. The remaining money, and any future donations will be used to purchase new material for the archive such as these films and photographs. The collectors market for such things is rather buoyant and sadly, I do get outbid most of the time but I try!
My latest purchase is an interesting, but costly one. It’s yet another 16mm cine film, but this is one of the promotional films which were made by Hoseasons over the years to advertise holidays to the area. I’ve not come across this one anywhere before and I really wanted to have it for the archive. Broadland Panorama is about 20 minutes long, is in colour and has sound and will hopefully (Hoseasons allowing) be uploaded to the Broadland Memories YouTube channel at a later date. It cost just under £80, which I think is a pretty fair price really, but it has completely wiped out the website coffers now and I had to add the extra myself to secure it. I will probably have to put the original film back up for sale once it has been digitized to recoup website funds. If anyone may be interested in purchasing it then please let me know.
Thank you to all who have very generously donated to Broadland Memories this year as it really has been such a big help. I do genuinely hate having to rattle a collection tin, but if you get any enjoyment from browsing through the website and feel able to donate the price of a pint or a monthly magazine to help towards running costs, I would be extremely grateful. Please don’t feel under any obligation. The main reason I do what I do is to preserve and make accessible some of of it’s history and hope that viewers gain some pleasure from looking through the photos, or reading people’s memories and (most importantly) that it is a freely available resource.
