Wednesday 15 July 2009

Broadstairs beach, the tambourine dancer and two world wars.

Staying roughly on the theme of yesterday’s post, 1930s guides, I have put up more pages from, Come to Sunny Broadstairs the official guide for 1937.

This was a period of considerable social change mostly caused by WW1, prior to WW1 it would have been considered quite shocking for a woman to show her leg above the knee and bathing was done using bathing machines to prevent this from happening.

Between 1918 and 1937 we had advanced to the bikini as evidenced in yesterdays post.

From the historians point of view this is helpful when trying to date pictures.

There is another rather different effect caused by WW2 clothing rationing which meant that what people wore didn’t change significantly from 1939 to about 1955.

Looking through the 30 pages from this guide that I have published online I don’t think I could have dated many of the photographs closer than between those two dates.

Click here to look at the pages from the book

1 comment:

  1. If you look at Leni Riefenstahl's epic two reel film about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin you will see that this image of the young tambourine dancer leaping in a gymnastic pose echoes the images of young fit Germans of the same period in the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) movement

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.