iwm photos

[Les Freathy]

Hi Guys
Is anyone out there havinging a nightmare sorting through the IWM photo collection and in particular finding specific items in the search boxes. I am aware that the IWM observe these forums so you guys at the IWM can we please see some of the softskin vehicles in the KID series and if possible some RAF vehicles from the MH photos
Thanks

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

I have just acquired somew more IWM photos and it is difficult at times to find things online. Hence I have to e mail someone and ask...where in heck is something and where is photo number XYZ1234? The KIDbrooke series I have been through remotely by correspondence in the past. I have apparently all the Chevrolet CMP KID photos as prints but there are many more Fords of which I just have Xeroxes.

[cliff]

I find it hard as well but what annoys me is I cannot see a picture bigger then thumbnail size so it is hard to see details at all.

At least with the AWM you can click onto and get a slightly bigger sized picture.

Cheers
Cliff

[Nick Balmer]

Hello Les,

You make a very valid point, which has been exercising my mind as well.

I am a member of the Cambridgeshire branch of the Miniature Armoured Fighting Vehicle Association MAFVA, and we hold our branch meetings inside the IWM Duxford site.

Jack Livesey who is a curator (I don't know his official title) there was at January the meeting.

I raised exactly this point with him. He of course is very familiar with the photo collection.

I asked if I could get a copy of the classification system. He said that the indexing has grown up over a long period of time, and is very complex. Most of the vehicle photos are just part of other collections and albums that the IWM has collected over time. They therefore appear in the index as photos from Colonel X, or the Kidbrooke Collection etc.

Friends in the MAFVA have been working together to catalogue collections like the British Pathe collection, others are working to collect all the tank names, and to link tank names to registration numbers and photos.

If you go to the MAFVA website you can see some of this work.

Jack Livesey is working on an excellent new book on tanks for publication shortly. He asked Paul Middleton and I to look through the proofs of the text to see if we could spot any obvious mistakes. His book has a very good set of photos, many of which are new to even hardened veteran obscure photo hunters like Paul and I.

It is obvious that he has shown us over the years that there is an absolutely huge number of really interesting photos in the IWM still hidden away.

We should support and encourage the IWM in their efforts to put these photos on line.

One way we could support this is in helping with captioning and commentary on the photos. Most photos have only the title put on them by Sergeant X in 1944 who took the pictures. He was not in a position to write down a very detailed caption, and it would never have entered his head that 50 years later people would be interested in the exact model of truck or tank that it portrayed.

Many of the IWM and other curatorial staff are no longer military in background, or even experts in their field. Many are just "curators" or experts in keeping collections.

When the current really great and throughly knowledgeable expert curators like David Fletcher and Jack Livesey retire it is very likely that they will be replaced by "professional curators". These new librarians will be chosen by the UK Civil Service from a pool of trained curators, who will barely know the difference between an APC and a tank, let alone be able to date the photo by using the model number to tell that it could not be before October 1943, and that the Divisional sign is the 81st West African Division.

This process is already happening in many libraries and museums like the IWM and even British Library.

They leave university qualified as "curators" but with no real interest or knowledge of the subject they look after.

Chance gets them their first position, which could be for paintings, cars, music, but just happens to be IWM photos.

Knowledgeable anoraks will be disqualified in future from applying because they are not university trained civil service curators.

We should see if there is not some way that we can repay these libraries for the thousands of hours of pleasure they are and have given us, by making these photos available, by helping them to provide commentaries or sub catalogue entries. With modern computer search engines, these sub catalogue entries would soon help future researchers find what they are looking for.

As many of us are aware from books like the excellent After the Battle series on the Arnhem and D Day campaigns, that it is becoming possible to reconstruct a lot of campaigns in incredible detail by cross referencing photographs from the many different archives around the world, and from private collections.

Many photos in the IWM and elsewhere are separated from others showing the events they were taken at. It should be possible for groups of enthusiasts like us to help link them back up, by providing commentaries on these photos to places like the IWM or Canadian and Australian US or German collections.

Sadly there is an awful lot of very sloppy and ill informed captioning in mass produced books at present. Somehow we have to try to find a way to provide a future clear way of protecting the core information in these collections. If we don't do this now, future generations will be getting an awful lot of very dodgy evidence from these books and films.

Regards

Nick Balmer

[cliff]

Nick Les PM'ed me and told me how to get a slightly larger photo then the thumbnails and I have spent the last 4 hours browsing through some of the fabulous softskin photos alrady on line.

So to the IWM keep up the good work and please any photos of military vehicles especially softskins of WW2 era would be much appreciated.

Cheers
Cliff

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

If there are online thumbnails you can click and you get a 'larger picture' which opens up. Right click on the picture and you get the 'properties' with the address on it.

[cliff]

David the first time I tried I could not do this. Les Pointed it out to me as well and this morning when I re-entered the site it worked. There are some nice softskin photos in there of some rare British models so I am pleased they have started to make them availiable for viewing on line.

Cheers
Cliff

[Nick Balmer]

Hello,

I have found that the best way to get at a particular theme in the IWM site is to do a simple search for a word like "lorries" or "Burma".

This will bring up photos of examples of that theme.

If it was Burma these might have photo references starting with SE such as SE 007932.

Go back into the search and start again with SE * (don't forget to leave a space between SE and the * as for some reason it won't work otherwise.

This will bring up all the photos in the SE range. SE 1* works, as does SE 9* or any of the numbers in between.

There are A's, B, AUS, CBM, CM, BU, D, E, GM, and HU's to my certain knowledge, and probably far far more in there.

Regards

Nick Balmer

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

'Lorries', 'Lorry', 'Canada', 'Chevrolet', Ford', 'Canteen'...tried 'em all!

[Bill Murray]

I too am learning how to navigate the IWM and here are two items I came up with that are interesting from the "interwar" perspective.

Go to the site, select photos, then collections, if I remember right.

Two of the groupings are as follows.

6000-02 KID
4700-101 British Training for WWII
Those will give you a wealth of armour specifically but also a lot of the late 1920's 6X4 vehicles as well as a lot of tractors etc.

There are also some photos from the 1930's.

Based on what I saw in the KID grouping, there must be hundreds if not thousands more images if only we could unlock the code. They seem to have photographed every possible variant of every vehicle they tested but it only amounts to a few hundred photographs in that series and I know there are many more somewhere.

I really hope there are some others here on the forum that have identified "key" collection ID's that will pare down the winnowing process.

As others have posted here, there are a lot of "technicians" as opposed to "historians" that are sorting out the data/photo base.

I found vehicle photos when selecting "trans-jordan" for example, where there was no mention of a vehicle make but perhaps more a "purpose" ie medical unit or bridge building unit etc.

Given the energy on this Forum, I hope we can sort out the thought process that the curators used to identify this most amazing photographic data base.

I will post here a photo of one of the more unusual vehicles I found today.

[Nick Balmer]

Hello Bill.

It bears an an canny resemblance to a Kubel Wagen. Do you think Doctor Porche was plagerising?

It is just one of a number of quad prototypes. The sloping solid roof was eventually chosed so that the quad could be rapidly hosed down to remove mustard gas, which the army in 1938 expected to be used in future wars to knock out artillery and other rear areas.

Regards

Nick Balmer

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

I am going to get the print and see what the Census Number is!! I could just doi with that photo at the moment. I think, from the front rad design it might just be one of the two Guy Quad Ant prototypes from late 1937, although only trialled in 1938. Looking at the caption I think that is what it is...either the diesel-engined or petrol-engined one, the former had four-wheel steering. H 385731 & 385732 supplied under V.3168. Can anyone suggest if this one has a winch or not please?

I have just checked the IWM site
http://www.iwmcollections.org.uk/qryPhotoImg.asp
..if you type in 'KID' and nothing else in the 'PHOTOGRAPH NUMBER' space on the page and then select at the drop-down box 500 images to be viewed, yyou get say 285 images. However type in 'KIDBROOKE' in the 'SUBJECT' box and then select 500 images, you get many more! !A better suggestion is typing in 'MINISTRY OF SUPPLY' in the 'SUBJECT' box, as it reveals all the Kidbrooke photos, as well as a few gems such as Carriers.

To explain, Kidbrooke was the Ministry of Supply offices at the station of the same name failry near Woolwich in South-east London. The vehicles were tested there and photographed sometimes on a village green a few miles away..you get to recognise the same location

[Bill Murray]

Thank you David for expanding on my initial suggestions.

What a gold mine for armour buffs!!

I would suspect now that a lot of the Kidbrooke photos have not yet been catalogued as there are perhaps only 300 or so that we have come up with using the search techniques we have discovered so far.

Based on many other photos that I have seen from Bart, Les, Mike Conniford and others, many of which seem to have been taken on the same green, I suspect that somewhere in the stacks are tons more softskin photos waiting to be uploaded, scanned or whatever into the data base.

Let us all keep looking.
Bill

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

As mentioned before I have Xeroxes of the Kidbrooke Ford CMP and a few MCP photos and prints of all the Chevrolets. There are a whole host more of them then! However I know someone at the IWM who may have the typed list of all the KID series.

[Bill Murray]

Hi David:
MCP photos are amongst my favourites. If you have some that have not already been posted here or elsewhere on MLU, please feel free to do so

Bill

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

The only print I bought was a 1940 Searchlight 6 x 4 and all the rest are Xeroxes. I am however going to purchae more prints in due course.