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You are here: Home > Museums > Cameras
One day we were peacefully minding the shop when Ken and Sue Inerson arrived with a car load of cameras. 'Would you like to add them to the museum?' And I thought 'Er- where?, er-why? er-how?' And then Ken started telling me about the collection.
The main collector was his father Eric, who had collected the cameras between 1917 and 2008. During the 1939-45 war he had worked as a metallurgist for David Brown Engineering. (Well, I thought, we have a David Brown Tractor.) Late in the war he was headhunted by Frank Whittle, and he moved to work on the first successful jet engine.
(For the pedantic amongst you, I must mention the war time efforts in Germany, but although technically advanced, the German engines had a life of only about 25 hours compared to the 150 hours of the Whittle engines. The difference being due to the high cobalt alloy used in the hot parts of the Whittle engines. )
With the success of Whittle's engine Eric's career also became airborne and he had less time for camera collecting. Ken took up the hobby and joined the local camera club. The Chairman of the club had been in the RAF during the war, and had been posted to a remote Egyptian base, where servicemen were in the habit of swapping their meagre supply of books when off duty. One day he was finishing a book and noticed that his neighbour was also about to finish. 'Swap?' he suggested, whereupon his new friend warned him that his book was in Arabic. It turned out that the gentleman was 'Aircraftman Shaw'. No less then T. E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia.
Now, between the wars (1920s and 1930s) Lawrence had a job selling speedboats for The British Motorboat Company, and this company also sold two wheeled BMB tractors. We have a BMB Ploughmate in our collection. So with the link with David Brown at one end of this fascinating story, and the BMB tractor at the other, how could I refuse to take the cameras?
The Museum (Radios, Computers and Farm Machinery) provide an alternative attraction for members of visiting groups who are less interested in the craft, farm or ecology side of a visit here. Radios and Computers also represent the new 20th century industries which developed from the combination of scientific developments and the tinkering of craftspeople working at home. Although computing is the management of information, and does not necessarily require any technology to take place, the availability of cheap radio components by the middle of the 20th century contributed enormously to its later development. Radios and Cameras took simple 19th century technology to develop to the point where they could contribute to computing, but as computers advanced, both radios and cameras adopted digital electronics from the computer industry.
The cameras on show, at this stage represent those that most people started with. Mainly we are displaying the cheaper simpler cameras that are probably the ones that turned the camera industry from a cottage industry run by enthusiastic hobbyists into the great industry it is today. The more exotic and expensive machines would only have been bought by a few professionals, and small specialist companies could have supplied the market. However the technical advances tried out on these rare beasts, eventually filtered down to the ordinary cameras which are on display now, and helped the ordinary taker of family snaps to turn out work of which hey can feel proud. We also display curiosities like the rather mean spirited Roadside Witness, produced by Acci-Cam to help provide proof of someone else's guilt after you have run into them, and the delightful VP Twin sold by Woolworths in bits in order to keep the price of each item down to £1.00.
The cameras on show now include: - Portland 12, Boots Instapac K, Roadside Witness, Boots Pocket Pacer, Kodak Instamatic 33, Kodak Instamatic 177X, Brownie 127, Brownie 44A, Cosmic 35, Praktica MTL 5B, Fuji Finepix 2400 Zoom, Kodak Disc 4000, Kodak No2 Autographic Brownie, Brownie Six-20 Model C, Brownie Six-20 Model D, Kodak Duoflex, Kodak Brownie Vecta, Coronet Ambassador, VP Twin, Ross Ensign, Ensign All Distance 20, Pentax ME Super, Kodak Brownie Flash II, Ilford Sportsman, Kodak Junior, Polaroid Swinger Land Camera, Halina Micromatic, and Coronet Bellows camera with every distance lens.
More information will be provided about these cameras and others in the collection will be displayed later.
The cameras on show will also change from time to time. With 300 to choose from there are plenty of 'themes' to chose!
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