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An age of contrasts
Defining the period when our sense of nostalgia shifted from sometimes gaunt, sometimes glamorous, black-and-white into the wondrous world of colour is one of those fascinating judgments which, like some artistic DNA, gives a clue to our coming-of-age.
The Sixties provided the dividing line for the baby-boomer generation but at what stage? The assassination of John Kennedy, the 1966 World Cup and the Moon landing were definitely colour, as was the Beatles' psychedelic period. Harold Macmillan, Tottenham Hotspur's double-winning team, Yuri Gagarin and the Beatles in Hamburg were, equally decisively, in the monochrome era.
On that basis, the cut comes somewhere around 1962-3 but it is impossible – and self-defeating – to impose too much precision. The pre-war Gone with the Wind and Shane (1953) were in colour; Rebecca (1940) and High Noon (1952) were black-and-white.
But one thing is certain: for whatever emotional reasons, we'll always look back at the Fifties in mono. Stanley Matthews, Humphrey Bogart, Vic Oliver, Malcolm Muggeridge, Freddie Grisewood, Jim Laker, the Goons: our world was black-and-white.
And so was the world of professional photography, then a small, London-based community into which Walter Hanlon tentatively made his way.
Walter was born in Glasgow to musical parents in 1926. He joined the Merchant Navy, based at Scapa Flow, at the age of 14 – lying about his age to gain entry – and spent his war on convoy duty, on occasion taking over at the helm. Afterwards, with help from his parents, he learned to play the guitar and proved good enough to tour Germany and Italy with ENSA and the American USO and play with the David Millar and George Elrick bands.
While playing and touring he became interested in photography and found that contacts he had made in the music business provided him with access to the nightclubs and haunts of the stars of the jazz scene in the capital in the early Fifties.
There he made a new career; the guitar was put in its case and forgotten. He never played again.
Hanlon's spell as a photographer was brief and centred on two subjects: musicians and motor-racing. He had long been fascinated by cars, racing a vintage Riley Nine (with "sponsorship" of 40 gallons of fuel a year from Jet) and a 1936 Talbot 105 – the latter "a beautiful car" he still remembers – and, with the help of the Daily Express, sponsors of virtually all British motor-racing in the post-war years, he gained access to the pit-lane at Silverstone, Crystal Palace, Goodwood and Brands Hatch.
"They gave me a pass and in return they could use any of my photographs in the race-day programmes but not in their newspaper," says Hanlon.
His emotive, intimate pictures of singers and musicians were exhibited at the London Jazz Club in 1952. Later, when he had retired from a career in television lighting, his work from the music scene would go on public display at the Mercer and Ferens Galleries in Harrogate and Hull as well as the National Portrait Gallery and he published an impressive book.
There was, his family told him, still more to be done with his archive of pictures from the Fifties, especially those he had taken in the early days of Grand Prix racing. So, with the help of Jane Sellars, the curator of art at the Mercer Gallery, he has put together another exhibition.
This time he combines shots from show business with others from what, to eyes accustomed to the high-tech world of modern Formula One, is a primitive age.
The show comes with a brilliant Fifties soundtrack – Alma Cogan, Eddie Calvert (plus golden trumpet, of course), Ronnie Hilton and many others.
As he looks again at his work, Walter Hanlon remembers re-discovering the negatives of family groups, actors, musicians and singers, racing drivers, their mechanics and managers and being urged by his wife to "do something with them".
He recalls too the thrill of seeing and capturing images of "young Turks" like Stirling Moss and Mike Hawthorn, then at the start of their careers, of great drivers like Juan Manuel Fangio and Alberto Ascari, who raced dressed in slacks and a light sweater, no overalls for him. There were subjects like Froilan Gonzales – the "Wild Bull of the Pampas" who would not even be able to squeeze into a modern-day racing car – and Prince Birabongse of Thailand, whose grandfather was the character on whom Yul Brynner's role in The King and I was based.
Hanlon says, "One of my memories of Gonzales was of watching the start of a Grand Prix at Silverstone. The flag dropped and the grid swept off but without Gonzales, who had been too heavy-footed and stripped his clutch".
Those were the days when the drivers sat upright with no protection should they crash – as many of them did. The days, too, when fuel tanks were filled using a milk-churn and a giant funnel.
The cars are from a world rapidly emerging from post-war austerity, futuristic in design like the Mercedes W196 – the model driven by Moss to his first grand prix victory – and the twin-bodied Taruffi which first raced at Silverstone in 1951.
It was not unusual then for drivers to lend a hand in the preparation of their cars. One of Hanlon's photographs has Stirling Moss checking the tyre pressures on his Kieft 500cc car before a race. "I had the privilege to be present at many stages of the construction of the Kieft by Ray Martin, Stirling's mechanic – with close supervision by Stirling – at a mews garage in south London," Hanlon remembers.
Then there was the night Mr and Mrs Hanlon booked into a bed-and-breakfast in Brackley to avoid an early morning departure from London for Silverstone.
"We were two doors away from the BRM garage and they kept us up all night with their banging and revving. The next morning, one of the Ferrari mechanics was driving their car to the track down the High Street with a policeman waving him on."
He also recalls driving Moss and Martin to Brands in his
Riley. "Stirling was just starting in Formula 500. He said my Riley did not have a tick-over, it was a clack-over."
But, for all the freedom of access he enjoyed, Hanlon never became close to his subjects. "Hawthorn was my favourite but I didn't get to know him or anyone else really well. It was a case of the drivers and crews getting on with the job, treating me as though I wasn't there."
It was much the same when he took his photographs of show-business personalities. "In the days when I was meeting the jazz celebrities like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan I was too busy concentrating on getting the best picture to engage in much conversation."
But then Walter Hanlon is about pictures, not words. The juxtaposing of his unique motor-racing catalogue and his sharp, era-defining images of stars like Dickie Valentine, the Beverley Sisters, Geraldo, Dorothy Squires and Jean Simmons was a risk but one which pays handsomely.
This is the black-and-white Fifties through the eyes of a man of many parts, a man who could, as he had done did with music, drop his career in photography.
That was in 1955 when he entered the new world of television in which he worked until retirement in 1989. "I finish and move on to something else," he says.
That does not mean we have arrived at the last roll of film from Walter Hanlon's Rolleiflex. His world will not stand still, for all that its magic is rooted in the days when we were young.
Walter Hanlon: Faces of the '50s, Mercer Gallery, Harrogate, to
November 8.
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