Guided Tour part 5 – Travel

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This is a new section, and one where I know there will be plenty of photos to add - not least from the 10 holidays my parents had in Venice. Quite apart from the usual European summer holidays and city breaks there are trip to Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal, Malaysia, Mauritius, the Bahamas, the Maldives and Thailand. The first set I have posted is from my dad's 1953 cycling trip through the French Alps. We went back to the Alps in the summer of 2008, just a few months before my dad died, and the first time he'd been back to some places since he was there in 1953. As I say, lots more to come here! I've also been looking to see what other sections I can add to the site. I can definitely see a section on gardens and flowers, which he loved photographing - plenty of visits to Hidcote in the Cotswolds and Kew in London, as well as flowers anywhere and everywhere....
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Guided Tour part 4 – My Dad’s Life

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This section of the site is a bit more personal, but will still have something to interest people. While not everyone will necessarily be that interested in student life at Imperial College in the mid 1950s, or the productions of the Imperial College Drama Society, I have found them fascinating to see how differently people lived and even looked back then. Look at the parties, and how everyone seemed to sit on the floor. The "Early Life" section even has some colour photos from the 1930s - look at the swimming trunks my dad is wearing in this one! The "National Service" section has some great shots of his time in the Army - he was in REME and I believe he ended up lecturing about radar for a time. Some of it just shows the sheer mundanity of service life! ...
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Guided Tour part 3 – Northampton

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The third part of the website is devoted to my home town, Northampton, and like the Kings Road photos is a mildly interesting piece of social history. A lot of the photos were taken in the early/mid 1970s when the centre of town was being redeveloped - the not-at-all missed bus station and suchlike. It's not all bad though as there are sets of photos from the Borough Show, the Carnival and the Raft Race in the 1970s, and plenty of photos from Abington Park, where we spent many happy days in my childhood - I expect many people will have happy memories of Gallone's ice cream. There are also plenty of photos of the canals around the town and Stoke Bruerne. I'm sure there will be plenty more photos of the town to come from the rest of the archive....
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Guided Tour part 2 – People

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The other part of the site that has got the most attention is the sets of photos from Kings Road in Chelsea, taken between 1967 and 1975 -a time of such fantastic changes in the fashion scene - swinging 60s through to the less renowned 70s. However bad the 70s fashions got, it's still a great record of what real people were wearing. The one shot that always catches my eye is this one. The first thing I thought was "Bay City Rollers", and you'd be so wrong. They hit it big in 1974-75-76, while this photo was taken in July 1973. Far from being trend-setters, they were a good 2 years behind the fashion. Unfortunately there is nothing remotely like this to add to the "People" section - it's basically the only street photography my dad ever did - and I'm not quite sure what else to add. The obvious additions is a "Family" section - the big advantage of having all of his photos is that I...
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Guided Tour part 1 – Motorsport

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Seeing as I've merged the mydadsphotos blog and the john.shendy.co.uk website, I thought I'd give a brief guided tour of what you can find. First up - the motorsport. The crown jewels of this section are undoubtedly from my dad's trips to Le Mans 1959, 1960 and 1961, plus the Monaco Grand Prix 1962 - some fantastic images, especially the colour ones like this But that's not all there is - there are photos from 6 British GP's between 1958 and 1977, 7 International Trophy events between 1960 and 1974, and all sorts of other events from Silverstone and Brands Hatch. Not to mention some vintage car stuff as well. Unfortunately there aren't any more motorsport photos to add - I've scanned and posted basically everything, including some of less than perfect quality, as it's such a great set of photos from a classic era of motorsport. There are lots more photos of cars to come as my dad would always take photos of anything interesting he saw - lots of Ferraris...
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France 1986 – St Tropez

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Following on from the previous post about the summer 1986 holiday to Port Grimaud (although this post will appear above it in Wordpress), when we went over to St Tropez there was a huge crowd of onlookers ogling at the beautiful people leaving a party on some vast yacht. I'm sure some of these people might be famous (there was a suggestion of a Monaco Princess, and the chap in the third picture appears to be signing an autograph) but I have no idea who there are. One presumes there was a gold & white theme, unless that happened to be the trend that summer. ...
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France 1986

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1985 turned out to be the last full family holiday - in 1986 The Brother was 20 and presumably didn't fancy the coach trip all the way down through France to Port Grimaud in Provence, just across the bay from St Tropez. I really don't recommend doing it by coach from London - a mere 818 miles according to Google Maps - many, many hours for a bored teenager with just a Sony Walkman and a limited supply of tapes and batteries (the only album I can recall is Suzanne Vega's first one, but given that most of the photos from the holiday show me wearing Marillion t-shirts, I suspect Script for a Jester's Tear was in there as well). The parents went on a day trip to Monte Carlo (which I skipped - no idea why!), with vast plumes of smoke from forest fires filling the sky. I remember them describing the central reservation of the autoroute smouldering from where...
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France 1985

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There are surprisingly few photos from this holiday, probably the first one with no black and white. In 1985 we spent the whole two weeks at St Jean de Monts in the Vendee again. The holiday was later than usual - I am sure the fact that I turned 17 while we were away and you could bring back a duty-free allowance of alcohol for 17 year olds played absolutely no part in the scheduling. None at all... ...
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France 1984

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For the 1984 summer holiday, we spent a week in Carnac in Brittany and then ventured a bit further south well, we drove down to the Vendee and St Jean de Monts. A lovely place as I recall, with a vast sandy beach being reached through a pine wood. As for Carnac, you can probably imagine how interested a 16 year old boy was in standing stones. It took a long time for me to be able to utter the word "Carnac" without the word "sodding" in front of it. ...
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France 1983

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I'd previously posted pics of the family holiday to France in 1983, but I'm re-doing it now as there are more photos. We went back to Benodet for a week, and had a week at an inland site at Belle Isle en terre (somewhere in Brittany). We have a couple of good entries for the Fat Frenchman collection, as well as a particularly good Englishman on holiday (chinstrap beard, budgie smugglers, and there may even have been sandals) The final shot, of "La Guitoune" in Roscoff, is in commemoration of what has gone down in family lore as the worst meal ever. We had hardly any money left and it was cheap - and wasn't worth the money. I seem to recall it being badly cooked (semi-raw fried eggs, that sort of thing). I believe we may not even have left a tip!...
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