A week or so ago I found something I didn’t know I had. It was a copy of “The Photographic Journal, the official organ of the Royal Photographic Society” dated January 1929. It’s significance for me was that it contained a paper, accompanying an account of a demonstration, delivered by my father, Leslie Walter Oliver in 1928.
His paper began,”A method of of photography in colour which, by a single snapshot exposure, gives negatives from which colour prints can be made with the simplicity of bromide prints, is an ideal for which the world is expectantly waiting. To our knowledge such a process does not exist, but we are going to demonstrate a process this evening which, we believe, is a large step in the direction of this ideal and is we claim, the simplest known process of obtaining colour prints on paper.”
Now you may be wondering what this has to do with “green shoots”. Well, if you will bear with a little more biography, I’ll get to it.
My father left school at fourteen and worked for a while in an engineering works and lived in digs (lodgings). During much of that time he was poor, dirty and cold – a condition he spent the rest of his life trying (and succeeding) to avoid. Then, thanks to a pushy mum, he joined the Royal Aircraft Establishment as an apprentice. One of his tutors advised him that colour photography looked a promising new area to pursue, which led to him presenting this paper in 1928. In 1935 he was recruited to set up Technicolor UK, where he ended up as Managing Director for several decades.
Now I had known for some years that here in the UK, and no doubt in other places too, the years of the Great Depression were good years, prosperous years for some. Stupidly, until a few days ago that was just interesting fact for me. I hadn’t made the biographical connection. For my dad they were good years, an opportunity for social mobility, a growing career in a growing industry.
So, despite the barrage of offers to “beat the Credit Crunch”, and all the rest of the eager cries of doom and gloom from the commentators, who hadn’t seen it coming, the reality is that a lot of people are going to do just fine in these “difficult time”. If you’ve got a job and the right kind of mortgage you might even be better off than you were last year.
For those of us in a shakier position, particularly if you are young, I say look for the green shoots, “the ideal for which the world is expectantly waiting”, whatever it may be, for there will be some, just as there were in the Thirties.