A bit of a Mexican stand-off in this brilliant photograph taken back in 1953. The Hollywood influence had put right on the side of the cowboys – but that was all to change with movies in the 1960s and 70s that, against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, changed the goalposts to make the Indian the heroic victim of colonial oppression. For all of us kids, that was a philosophy too far. If we weren’t killing Germans, it was Indians.

The great shame is that, political incorrectness apart, there seemed to be far more imaginative play in those days (and outside too!). Somewhere along the decades we have lost something – I think it is called childhood.

When I started this blog, my aim was to illustrate how photography had recorded Liverpool over the past 150 years. Wherever possible, I have been posting previously unseen images that add to the already large number of Liverpool photographs in circulation. My collection is obviously privately owned but I believe there is a responsibility to make it public, rather than hide it away unseen. Our interpretation of history is very much dependent on primary sources of information being made available and photography is an indispensible tool for all local historians.
This is nowhere more evident than in the photographs I have posted today. The desperate poverty shown in the first photograph (taken off Scotland Road by N. Steven in the early 1890s) compares dramatically with the second photograph, taken from one of the Earle family albums, of their relatives, the Swinburnes in about 1870. Admiral Charles Swinburne is photographed with his wife and three daughters, all dressed in their finest outfits – a total contrast to the rags and barefeet of the three girls. As the saying goes … a picture is worth a thousand words.

This photograph of Havelock Street was photographed by Karl Hughes to be used as an illustration in
Liverpool author, Frank Shaw’s book ‘My Liverpool’, published in 1971.

What is immediately apparent is the traffic-free street, giving the children the freedom to play outside. With no open space nearby and other amenities very limited, the street became a focal point for the community in a way that no longer exists.

Twenty years ago, back in 1990, a tall, white-bearded American burst into my office holding a box of photographs.
His name was Frank Dugan, born in New Jersey in 1925. Frank joined the US Air Force in 1949 and was sent as a control tower operator at Burtonwood in 1950.

He met Mary Green, from Anfield, at Speke Airport and they married in 1953 after he had demobbed. Fancying himself as a photographer, he took wedding photographs for a living, finishing off his rolls of film with the occasional shot of Liverpool life.

As an American in a foreign city, Frank was fascinated by Liverpool, particularly the endless terraced streets and the poverty he witnessed. Frank returned to the States in 1955 to start up as an antiques dealer and his short career as a photographer was effectively over.
Back in 1990, Frank was hoping to have a book published but there weren’t enough images – so I used many of them in a calendar. The photographs all had that magic quality of freezing time that only photography can achieve. Frank died in 2003 but these images will stand the test of time.

The idea of this blog is to bring to a wider public the thousands of images that are hidden away in archives both public and private. My own collection (of over 5000 historical photographs) illustrates many aspects of Liverpool’s history – the social, topographical, economic and cultural – and I will be posting new images daily to create a unique perspective on the city as seen through the camera’s lens.

Please add your comments. Perhaps you know what happened to the three lads in the photograph. They look desperately poor – but how did they turn out? This is the great thing about the web – it creates communities and shares knowledge in a way that was inconceivable ten years ago.