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Monthly Archives: November 2021

Read more about the article Newcastle’s Obelisk and “the social evil”

Newcastle’s Obelisk and “the social evil”

Was Newcastle's famous Obelisk once a site for illicit sexual assignations? It may have been, if I have understood the transcript of an 1866 public meeting correctly. The transcript, created as part of an elaborate joke apparently designed to reflect discredit on Newcastle's young municipal council, is a record of a meeting at which a reluctant candidate for office, Mr C. W. Williams, was quizzed over many aspects of civic life. Mr Williams was not a highly educated man. At the time the law allowed unwilling candidates to be elected to Newcastle's municipal council against their…

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Read more about the article Adrift on the river of time

Adrift on the river of time

I wrote the column above in The Newcastle Herald back in February 2005. That's nearly 17 years ago, as the crow flies. I use that seemingly odd expression deliberately, since it seems to me that time moves like some rivers: sometimes running pell-mell in a straight line through tight canyons of circumstance, sometimes meandering gently through sun-kissed meadows and sometimes twisting and turning through unexpected rapids and past overhanging branches at such a rate that the only thing to remain in your memory after the hectic passage is a few blurry images and a sense of…

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Read more about the article Old envelopes, old businesses

Old envelopes, old businesses

When we first acquired some of the late Ken Magor's vast collection of photographic negatives, many of the negatives were stored in second-hand envelopes that Ken had evidently scavenged from a variety of Newcastle businesses. Ken clearly needed something to store the negatives in, but in the late 1940s - in the wake of the war - many items were in relatively short supply. Ken was a master scavenger and he gathered large quantities of used envelopes from the printer Reg Pognoski, from the retail store Winns and from other sources as they became available. After…

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