
Midsummer sunflowers

Midsummer sunflowers

Lovely summer's lavender

Flaming summer sunset over the Swiss Jura
Photos from inside the pedestrian subway linking South Kensington tube station and the National History and V&A museums
More photos from my great-grandfather’s WWI archive … this time a couple of the ‘dieing’ ships that he obtained and took photographs of while he was on active service.
The SS City of Birmingham sank in the Mediterranean. This photo was taken by an unknown seaman who survived the Birmingham’s sinking and managed to photograph the ship going down. He was picked up alone on a raft making his way to shore, and my great-grandfather developed his photos for him, and made a copy of this one for his own records.
Once you look at these photos it’ll be pretty obvious that I didn’t take them myself. However, I can lay some sort of claim to them, after a fashion, because my great-grandfather (also a very keen amateur photographer) took them during his WWI service with the British merchant navy. I was flicking through the few photos of his that I have to hand (his overall archive is huge, and only partly digitised so far), and I thought I’d share a some of them.
This series comprises of some of the photos taken during my great-grandfather’s training and service in the Kite Balloon section of the Royal Naval Air Service – both in London and at sea.
The ruins of medieval Tantallon are magestic in their decay, and despite the ravages of both war and time the castle still commands the coast of the Firth of Forth at North Berwick. For those interested, Historic Scotland has more information on the history of the castle.
We made the trip up to Edinburgh for the second of the May long weekends to visit friends (our first trip there in over a year), and while there took advantage of the weather to finally explore the lovely and atmospheric Edinburgh Castle …