More New Fancy Pit Photos, & That Man in the Hat. (Photo Gallery)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Sunday, September 09, 2012, 02:33 (4454 days ago) @ Gillymott

Another source to view and buy old photos is the relatively new and growing site of Neil Parkhouse (of Lightmoor Press fame). His site has a few hundred Dean photos with a few less well-known ones of New Fancy pit, but again the only person shown is our friend in the boater. New Fancy photos are near bottom of this page, click to enlarge them.
http://www.archive-images.co.uk/gallery/Archive-Images-of-the-Forest-of-Dean-Coalfield/...

Also from Neil is this great website for the history of individual Dean pits, in case you didn't know, New Fancy is particularly well-covered;
http://www.lightmoor.co.uk/forestcoal/CoalNewFancy.html
(Click on the Pithead logo to find the menus to other pits etc).

I read in one of the old FoD photos books that the aforementioned "man in the hat" is thought to be an assistant of this particular photographer. Don't forget in those days the wooden box camera, it's heavy tripod, case of photographic glass plates etc etc all took some lugging about, so a photographer would usually have an assistant especially if walking "off-road" as twere. This particular assistant was also included in the photos because it was (and still is) thought to add extra interest to a scene if living people (or better still people with animals) were included in the "composition". Certainly some of these photos have not just one but groups of obviously staged young men in their Sunday best, as if the local cricket team's been hired for the day's shooting !