© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

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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Postcards from the Past, by Greg and Sylvia Ray

I've long been fascinated by postcards - especially old ones. They speak of a time when communication was a more leisurely business than it is today, and yet they symbolise the desire of people for quick and snappy means of staying in touch. Printed in vast numbers in the early years of last century, postcards were a collecting craze too, and many families still have old albums full of these intriguing ambassadors from the past. Our 13th book, Postcards from the Past, is a collection of cards depicting Newcastle, NSW, and its Hunter Region hinterland. The…

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Accidents, prangs and crashes, Part 4

Our Ken Magor collection of negatives contains many press photos, a large proportion of which were never used in the newspaper. In the cases where they have been filed in labelled envelopes, it is possible to link them with the events they illustrate by searching the marvellous Trove website. This sample shows some accidents involving trams on the streets of Newcastle. Henry Russell, 61, of Brunker Road, Adamstown, got a nasty shock on the morning of Friday, August 10, 1935. He was driving his horse-drawn cordial delivery cart in Hunter Street, Newcastle, near Wheeler Place, when…

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