Seventy five year old photographs ... and I don't know where! (help please)

[Keith]

Aaaaargh!

The roll (#11) I've just started to scan is a horror show ... it's marked Dawin/Java and it's either chronically over exposed or it was over developed or got fogged before processing somehow ... maybe all three? 😛

Just really dense with bugger all contrast and to add to the pain endless images of the same thing ... maybe the motordrive jammed on a couple of times! 😀

I've actually come to the conclusion that Kodak Panatomic was not a great film for these intense tropical light conditions ... the last roll of this stuff was much the same and it seems to have suffered from pretty severe shinkage evidenced by the distortion around the sprocket holes. The Agfa has been invariably good by comparison!

 

[bigeye]

Something may have been lost in the past few decades of ship building:

 

[Keith]

Roll #10 (Darwin~Australia) now posted in this thread.

 

[Keith]

Something may have been lost in the past few decades of ship building:

Man ... that's ugly! 😛

 

[oftheherd]

Something may have been lost in the past few decades of ship building:

What's the draft on those things? It looks like two crewmen on the same side or a soft breeze would capsize them. 😀

 

[NathanJD]

What's the draft on those things? It looks like two crewmen on the same side or a soft breeze would capsize them. 😀

under the water are 2 huge robotic legs that walk the ugly beast to it's destination 😀

 

[StaaleS]

Not sure now, if it's USS Wyoming or her sister Arkansas. The features I was studying to distinguish them (double anchors on port side and casemate guns amidship) are the same... I thought Arkansas may have had her obsolete casemate guns removed, but they are only shuttered in this picture. So it could be either ship.

It matters as Wyoming was in Le Harve in 1938 and Arkansas was in Cherbourg in 1936. The harbor does look more like Cherbourg to me...

USS Wyoming, BB-32, was rebuilt as an anti-aircraft gunnery training ship (reclassified as AG-17) in 1931 and had three of her 12-inch gun turrets yanked out and replaced with various anti-aircraft guns. So the ship in the photos must be Arkansas, BB-33, since she has all her main turrets still in place. Ergo Cherbourg, 1936.

 

[Terao]

What's the draft on those things? It looks like two crewmen on the same side or a soft breeze would capsize them. 😀

Amazingly, only 8-12m! The QM2 (which at least harks back to the golden age) has a draft of just 33 feet.

 

[Terao]

Lovely picture of the Empress of Britain, bigeye. Perhaps hand coloured, but the girl's dress and the funnels resonate nicely. I love the stern of that ship.

As an aside to this discussion of the Empress of Britain, her earlier sister ship Empress of Ireland was lost in the worst shipping disaster in Canadian history, rammed in the St Lawrence Seaway by a collier with the loss of over 1000 lives.

 

[bigeye]

USS Wyoming, BB-32, was rebuilt as an anti-aircraft gunnery training ship (reclassified as AG-17) in 1931 and had three of her 12-inch gun turrets yanked out and replaced with various anti-aircraft guns. So the ship in the photos must be Arkansas, BB-33, since she has all her main turrets still in place. Ergo Cherbourg, 1936.

Definitely! I thought she had them yanked later, during the war. Here's a 1935 shot of the Wyoming without 2 midship and 1 aft turret. So, Betina's photo ship, the USS Arkansas was unique.

 

[Peter Klein]

Keith: Just saw the whole set of these photos. Fantastic! And good for you for doing all that work.

I think Roll #9 was taken partly in whatever French port the shooter sailed from. In #2 the tender ship is "Ingenieur Minard," (French for "Engineer"). #13 and its neighbors are almost certainly in French-speaking Quebec, Canada. Notice the French signs, yet the petroleum company in the billboard mentions Pennsylvania and is "Ltd." Some of the neighboring photos in the middle of the roll might have been taken from the ship while in the St. Lawrence River, heading to whatever port from which the passengers switched to rail travel.

From the sequence, I believe she took taken trains from Austria to a French port, sailed across the Atlantic and into the St. Lawrence, and then took a train across the continent, stopping in Banff. Then down to San Francisco, and thence to Hawaii and Asia.

Where two localities are on the same roll, the order in which they appear can tell us the order of her travel, and from that it might be possible to reconstruct her route.

--Peter