By our War Correspondent Stephen Bell
The 1940s weekend at Pickering is one of the first events I look for to mark in my diary. For anyone who has not been before the weekend goes something like this. Re-enactors and enthusiasts pack out the town and its surroundings including the North Yorkshire Moors Railway and transport us back to wartime Britain. The streets heave with people dressed in all forms of authentic clothing ranging from military personnel representing all the forces, to land girls, ARP Wardens, Police and folk dressed the way the general public would have been dressed back then. Singers perform in the streets and on the train platform, attracting others to show off their dancing skills by jiving and jitterbugging and so on. Pubs are packed to the rafters and merchandise can be bought from the various market stalls in the town. And this is just in Pickering itself. The various stations along the NYMR route all participate in some way. Levisham for example becomes the French town of Le Visham for the weekend and is taken over by the German forces.
Saturday for me always starts with watching the parade through the town with a sausage or bacon sarnie from the usually heaving cafe at the bottom of the main street. From here you can see the whole of the parade making its way from the top of the town to the station. Looking up you can see how packed the street becomes and this year was the busiest I have seen in the 6 years I have attended. After the parade you can just wander around taking pictures to your heart’s content and though people are willing to be photographed, finding a suitable background can be rather tricky with so many people around. There are certain places however, where you can place your subjects with a little gentle persuasion. This year the light was quite harsh and with a lot of people wearing hats you had to work a little harder for your portraits but hey, who says photography is easy.
After spending a couple of hours in the town Ian Stafford rang and we met up at the station and set off around the other side of the tracks where there is tree cover which subdued the light a bit. Ian had also brought along a multi coloured reflector so we tried taking pictures against the light with a willing participant with a cracking beard and moustache. Great fun. Ian is a very technical and informative photographer who passed on tips and some new ideas to try (Help Desk hits the road!).
We met some great people who were well up for posing for some pictures including Tony an ARP Warden from Nottingham who, when we told him we were DPS members, invited us along to his ARP shelter to photograph him and his partner. Email addresses were swapped and when we mentioned DPS he was keen to have a look at our site. He offered to send us dates of similar events around the Midlands area. Top Man.
Time for a coffee now, so we grabbed a table next to a window and had a look at what we had taken so far. Looking at Ian’s shots taken with an 85mm 1.4 lens I was most impressed.
On the train station Lola Lamour, one of our favourite singers, was performing, so we shot some pictures across the platform. Pickering station now has a new roof on and this tended to help with the harsh light but also slowed down your shutter speeds, a good test of the IS system on your lens.
We then made our way back to the town stopping to chat and photograph a great chap called Brian who was dressed as a gamekeeper, complete with gun and his brace of bird’s attached to his belt. Again, another great bloke. Then it was back to the town for a beer and a catch up with our respective families in The Bay Horse. A fitting end to another great day.
Here’s looking forward to next year’s event in 2012, or is it 1945.
Stephen Bell
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