Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream...
Gently down the stream,
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream...
I don't know who or why, but with the three photos above, at least I know when and where... On/at Lake Åsunden, near Ulricehamn in the province of Västergötland, Sweden; August 27, 1933. I get the impression that it must have been an outing that involved at least two boats. (Looking again: Or maybe not? But in that case, where did the 5th person in the first photo disappear to??)
All the photos are from my great-aunt Gerda's album. Without the dates on them I might never have connected them as being from the same occasion, as all the photos have been glued into the album in no particular order. (Or at least no order that makes sense to me!) No better evidence for that than these, collected from pages 1, 18 and 34! (Had to "photo-copy" them with my camera rather than scan them, as it's not a scan-friendly album.)
I'm not sure if this is from the same occasion, but let's pretend. Anyway I'm pretty sure that this is Gerda herself; and wearing a similar style of hat and outfit as one or two of the women above.
In 1933, Gerda was living in Stockholm - when not off travelling with her famous employers (Estelle and Folke Bernadotte), who did travel a lot. (Gerda as lady's maid / housekeeper often travelled with them.) She had sisters and brothers living in Västergötland, though, so I'm thinking these photos are from a holiday when she was visiting family in these parts.
Linking to Sepia Saturday 476
PS. Adding two photos that I took at Ulricehamn harbour last summer... Compare the background in these to the background in the first two above! Makes me think now they may actually not have gone very far from the shore...
15 comments:
i am smiling at the way they are all dressed up and in hats while boating. i bet they would die of shock if they saw the way people go out in boats now. teeny tiny bikinis and all that... a fun look back to the 30's
So funny how they are on the boat, and climbing the rocks, and all dressed up in suits and hats!! Maybe they were heading for church, ha ha!
Ginny, church or not - I just checked, and August 27, 1933 was indeed a Sunday. That makes sense, as a longer outing would require a day off work.
No life-jackets either!!!
That is a bit of a mystery how all five managed to be in one picture when the other two pictures have only the four women. Obviously the one man took the pix of the gals, but who took the pic' he was in???
Wonderful memories and photos!
Snapshots at a lake are a universal theme. I think these rowboats are rentals and the man in the vest gave his camera to the boathire operator for a picture of everyone. The camera was a special type that had a little window on the back that let the photographer scribe a caption that would appear on the negative.
Of course they would be close to the shore so that whoever was taking the photo from the shore could still see them clearly. At least that is my guess, unless there were indeed two boats on the same occasion, and they were taking pictures of each other, from the boats.
As horrible as the 30s were in some ways, the general aesthetics - in fashion, arts, furniture, architecture - were great.
I enjoyed seeing the contrast between the lake background then and now. I am always intrigued by the change in leisure clothing over the decades. The '30s seems so formal by today's standards.
LaN, I think the answer may be hiding in plain sight in the third photo, because there are four women there, while there were only three women in the boat!
Amy, it's odd how some of these old photos almost become my own memories when I study them - even though they were taken decades before my time!
Thanks for the info on the camera, Mike. I was wondering about that, how they went about it to get the text onto the negative.
Meike, the more I look at the photos, the clearer it is to me that it is the same boat with the same people. It's just that the boat is turned the other way round from one photo to the next, and in one photo one of the men is missing... I suppose Mike above is on the right track (that it was that guy's camera, and he first took a photo of the other four, but then also wanted a picture with himself in the boat too, so handed over the camera to someone else on the shore). And if it wasn't the boat hire operator who took the photo of the five of them, it could have been the older woman sitting on the ground in the next picture, because she is not in the boat in either of the other photos! (I'm now thinking that the party may have consisted of Gerda, two older sisters, one sister-in-law, one brother and one brother-in-law. That's just a guess, though.)
Graham, you are certainly right about a change of style in leisure clothing over the past century... and Sundays were for dressing up rather than for dressing down!
Yes, they do seem to be skimming the shore. Perhaps they didn't know how to swim so stayed where they could walk if the boat capsized? A shame you don't know who is in the photos, but they still give a nice sense of leisure activities at the time -- with the then and now photos providing an interesting contrast.
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