The Boy and his Comic by Lynda Waterhouse

 Image ©Harry Townsend

I am drawn to this image. This moment in time. A boy absorbed in his comic. It is well worn and battered copy. How long has the boy had to wait a while for this treasure to be passed on to him?

Ten minutes to ten in the morning. Sunlight through the window. The mess on the mantelpiece including a treasured candlestick. The stillness of a child lost in reading. Only a tousled head, a slightly grubby hand and the cuff of his jumper on display. At this time of day it must have been taken on a weekend or the school holidays.

It was taken by Harry Townsend (1891 – 1964). Harry was a chronicler of everyday working class life in my area of South London. He was taking photographs from 1910 until the 1960s.  No-one apart from his family and a few friends, and now you, have ever seen his work.

Henry Percy Roy Townsend was born on 13^th January 1891 in Regent Street, Lambeth. He was the seventh or eighth child born to Charles (a cabman/groom) and Emma (an opera hat maker). Eventually Emma had 10 or 11 children born between 1868 and 1895 of whom two girls and eight boys survived. By the time Harry arrived there were nine family members plus five lodgers living in the house.

His granddaughter Gina says, ‘by the time we grandchildren were old enough to remember him, he was near the end of his life. He had put away his cameras and developing and printing equipment and stacked his hundreds of negatives in old biscuit tins.’

And so to the photographs; we know that he was an avid photographer probably from the 1910s to about the early 1960s. His wife, Kathleen, frequently bemoaned the fact that Harry had to put blackout up in order to develop the photographs, then had strips of negatives slung from lines across the wash house whilst they dried.

As the wash house had the only tap and sink for everyone in the house, not to mention the boiler and mangle that had to be used on wash days, Harry’s photography must have been carried out under considerable time constraints that were definitely a ‘bone of contention’.

Harry took two sorts of photographs: those of family and friends and those of local subjects doing every day activities, which give us a glimpse of domestic life in this corner of Southwark during the first half of the 20^th Century.’