Cowden – A Century of Images

Introduction

I am very pleased to announce the publication of my book entitled ‘Cowden –  A Century of Images‘.  First published September 2013 and is now in its second edition; ISBN 978-0-9926787-0-8.

The book is based upon a novel idea by the author’s uncle, Harry Turk (1929-1987) who used to collect original postcards of the area where he loved and lived all his life; namely the villages around Cowden, Kent in the UK.  Cowden is a small village and close to the neighbouring counties of East Sussex and Surrey.  

The Photography

Throughout the book are over 100 digitally renovated images of vintage photographs to be found on postcards.  The process of recording a live image, later to be known as photography, was made possible by the technique of camera obscura, the projection of an image onto a surface, and the discovery of light sensitive materials.

Niépce’s early process took hours or even days to make an exposure, the images were negative and could not be fixed (made permanent), they turned black when viewed in light.  Niépce’s associate Daguerre developed (excuse the pun) his process and reduced exposure times greatly taking now only minutes to produce very clear finely detailed results.  It was Fox Talbot that invented the negative

hand colour tinting, adding elements in the darkroom, people etc

These photographs were taken since the dawn of photography around 1870

Additionally, digitally renovated photographs from Harry Turk, and one or two from his sister Beryl who took on the mantle after his passing.  There are also photographs the author took with medium format film since about the 1980’s up to present time on digital cameras.

History of Postcards

The book starts with a history of post cards, first introduced in Austria-Hungary in the year 1869 and was followed a year later by the UK Post Office in 1870.  The first postcard below shows the Fountain Inn in the High Street Cowden, just opposite where the author’s grandfather used to live.  It is dated after 1902 because of the King Edward VII ½d blue-green postage stamp but before 1918 when the price to send a postcard increased to 1d.  Indeed, the Post Office, as is quite normal, changed the colour of this stamp slightly to a lighter shade of green, this was in 1904, so we can date this postcard 1902-1904.  In fact the postmark can be read as November 3, 1904.

The second postcard below is a view of North Street, looking North from the High Street with a ½d King George V stamp issued 1911, so this narrows the date of this postcard to 1911-1918.  Again we can read the postmark, this is not always possible, as December 30, 1913, the message reads “To wish you all a very happy new year“, from M. Sandford who resided at Claydean, Edenbridge a small town close by.  In fact they very helpfully added the date as 30 December so we can deduce, which was common practice then, that they bought the postcard and stamp at the Post Office, wrote the festive message then posted it in this post box.  Well – almost!  This post box has a King George VI Royal cypher on it so it must have been replaced after 1937.