Getting from here to there - a trip down memory lane

When we have a car, we use it for lots of different purposes but some are more enjoyable than others. For this second October post I've selected a variety of photos of friends and family out for some some event or occasion, posing in front of or beside the cars that got them there. Apart from providing the means of transport, it seems they also make good backdrops!

My mother-in-law Mary on a camping trip, posing beside her new husband Bob Featherston's pride and joy, a Nash, in 1947.

Mary, Bob, his mother Grace Eleanor Featherston and her sister Dulce, enjoying a picnic day out somewhere.

Mary's English aunty Grace White (nee Newth) with her husband Len, their son Alan and dog, posing  with their car as backdrop, probably somewhere in Gloucestershire where they lived.

On an annual Christmas camping trip in the 1960s, with my Dad Ian and my brother and sister, and the Consul station wagon, which would have been packed full of all the equipment needed for a week in a tent at the beach. I can see the essential Eski is still there in the boot. No portable fridges or other mod cons back then!

My husband in the early 1970s posing with his trusty first car, a dark green 1950/51 Austin A40, which took us on many a picnic and some longer trips before we reluctantly decided we had to let it go a few years later. He was sad to sell it for a mere $60.  I am currently getting a wooden model made of it as a Christmas present for him. Happy memories, although I can't say I missed its occasional crank starts and other idiosyncracies!

Husband second from left, with some of 'the boys' on a post-school trip from Canberra up to Queensland. He didn't try taking the Austin that far however, as that would have been asking too much of it.

5 January 1974 and the A40 is all dressed up by the boys in toilet paper and towing tin cans, ready to transport us from our wedding reception venue to the hotel where we were to spend the first night of our married life. My Dad looks to be scratching his head at the sight of it!

My grandfather Oliver Cruickshank posing with his Morris Minor, which coincidentally we got to drive for a few days on our honeymoon in NZ, while he and his second wife Maisie were holidaying in Australia after attending our wedding. Funnily enough, my mother's photo caption doesn't mention the car at all. It simply says  "Granddad Cruickshank enjoying his new Parka".  I think this was because the Parka jacket had been a recent gift form Mum and Dad.

Mum and Dad dressed in their finery beside Dad's Ford Fairmont in 1975, in which he chauffeured the daughter of some old friends to her wedding. I had learnt to drive on this car after leaving school in 1970. Driving the A40 soon afterwards was a rather different experience!

That's all from me this time, but no doubt you can take many more trips down memory lane and elsewhere here at Sepia Saturday #344:

        

On Yer Bike!

The theme for October is "From Here to There", and the prompt photograph shows a group of lady cyclists out for a ride. My first photograph shows my Aunty Pat and her brother Ken 'riding tandem' on their tricycle in about 1925. They must have been aged around 4 and 2 respectively. Young Ken had a lovely head of hair back then! Both Pat and Ken have featured in my blog a number of times, in particular here and here, but in this photograph they are simply young and innocent children having fun together on their tricycle.  

That tricycle was to last through four more children in the Morrison family. Below is young Derek taking his turn, followed  a few years later by Graeme and Peter, on this occasion riding it in the snow. I don't have a photo of my mother riding it, but I'm sure she would have also had her turn.

Uncle Peter above was exactly fifteen years older than me, as I was born on his fifteenth birthday. Here I am getting a dink from my Dad on the handlebars of his bike in Cambridge England in 1954, where bikes were and still are a very popular mode of transport. No child seats or safety helmets back then, but somehow most of us survived.

Back in Christchurch NZ as a 3 year old I regularly rode my smart 3 wheeler between home and my grandparents' house, Uncle Peter was still living there with his parents, but the old family tricycle beloved by him and his siblings had probably been given away by this stage.

I'll finish with a photograph of a real tandem bike. I've ridden tandem a couple of times and I can't say I enjoyed the feeling of not being in control, but here is Sergeant Pilot Bob Featherston, looking relaxed and carefree as he rides on the front of a tandem bike with a similarly uniformed friend in Bournemouth, early in World War 2. Bob had enlisted with the RAAF and was serving with the RAF Bomber Command. It cannot have been very long after this ride that the Lancaster of which he was in charge was shot down during a raid on Berlin. Bob was promoted to Flight Lieutenant whilst imprisoned in Stalag V111B, in Lamsdorf, Poland, where he was interned under harsh conditions for over two years, from January 1943 until the end of the War. I'm glad he was able to have some fun beforehand. 

The photograph comes from my late father-in-law Bob Featherston's collection of negatives. Another friend must have taken the shot for him.

For more blogs on this month's theme, just hitch a ride, any way you can, across to Sepia Saturday #344.