Photographic Archive – The Catalogues

Appealing for photographs

The appeal for photographs asked for anything in the following categories : 

A.  Historic, commemorative, or typical regular events – VE Day, Coronation, Jubilee, and Millennium celebrations, fun runs, fetes, the Erasmus Darwin play, the installation of the community shop, etc ; 

B.  Elston as it used to be i.e. photographs of houses, farm buildings, or other things that no longer exist ;   

C.  Buildings being erected or converted, including particularly the Village Hall, the school, any of the developments since WW2, either before or during their construction, and of conversions or additions to existing houses ;  

D. Work and leisure activities, local crafts, farming, cottage industries, etc ; 

E. The changing seasons – pictures of snow-covered fields or streets, flowers in bloom, crops or sheep in fields, trees in autumn, etc ; 

F. Groups – school, club, society, sports group photographs and activities ; 

G. Aerial photographs showing the village or the surrounding area ;  

H. Pictures of those who were no longer with us – old characters, family members, or people who made a contribution to village life. 

Organising the images 

This list served – and still does – to tell people the sort of pictures that are wanted. But for archiving purposes the categories had to recognise the different quantities of photographs that came in on each subject and in particular to break up the huge number of photographs of street scenes.  So the images of buildings were filed by street. And because there were large numbers of pictures of Elston Hall, the church, the Old Chapel, the school, Elston Towers, and Ardmore House, those buildings were kept in files of their own. The pictures taken from the church tower were also numerous enough to be kept separate.  Other categories included People, Events, Groups, Seasons, and Art Works.  

The catalogues for the street photographs were arranged logically in a walk from one end of the street to the other so that anyone could easily riffle through the volume to see if their house was in it without having to go through the whole catalogue or look up a reference number.  For those with computers the edit/find facility would locate it immediately. Since the pictures of people were so numerous and most of them undated, there was no alternative but to keep them in a single file in the order of their acquisition but which ultimately stretched to three catalogue volumes.  School and event photographs could be dated more easily and these were sorted into chronological order with the suffix indicating the year they were taken.    

The printed catalogue would require many volumes. Though some of the smaller categories would share a single volume, others would require one each. The display binders would accommodate 80 sides in polythene sleeves at a maximum of four images to the page, so an archive of 2000 pictures would take up at least six volumes. Using display binders meant that individual pages could be updated and replaced or if a number of new pictures appeared at a later stage all the pages could be moved along to make room for them. Meanwhile space would be left at the end of each volume for expansion. 

The intention was that the whole Heritage Project, including the original Lottery Application, the record of the two exhibitions and the results and documentation for each separate project, would be housed in matching volumes with themed spines for each project. In the case of the Photographic Archive the catalogues when lined up side by side would show a panoramic view of Elston Towers.  As soon as the catalogues produced at the First Exhibition had been reviewed and updated they were reprinted and advertised in Octave for people who lived in Elston to start borrowing them from the village shop, with the first becoming available in March 2009 and the last available by June. A set of new more robust binders was purchased to house the updated material.

The final catalogue contents were : 

VOL 1 : PEOPLE (PE1-250)

VOL 2 : PEOPLE (PE251-500)

VOL 3 : PEOPLE (501 -  ), WOMEN’S INSTITUTE

VOL 4 : CHURCH, CHURCH TOWER VIEWS, VILLAGE HALL FIELD

VOL 5 : TOP STREET, MILL ROAD, THE ORCHARD 

VOL 6 : TOAD LANE, THE PADDOCKS, CARRGATE LANE, LITTLE   SCUTCHEL, OLD CHAPEL LANE, OLD CHAPEL 

VOL 7 : LOW STREET

VOL 8 : TUDOR OAKS, ARDMORE HOUSE, PINFOLD LANE, THE SPINNEY, AERIAL VIEWS

VOL 9 :  SCHOOL, GROUPS

VOL10 :  EVENTS

VOL 11 : SEASONS, MISCELLANEOUS, ART WORKS

VOL 12  : ELSTON TOWERS, LODGE LANE, ELSTON HALL