If you're looking for a photograph, try the Daily Herald Archive

Blogger: Caroline Dempsey, Collections Assistant

Ever wondered what your sister or father looked like on the day they emigrated to Australia? Looking for photographs of how your town looked 50 years ago, or searching for images of David Attenborough in his youth. There's a good chance that the image you're searching for is in the Daily Herald Archive.

The Daily Herald archive comprises over 3 million photographs covering a period from 1911 through to the 1960s. The archive is broadly split into three sections: places, events and people.

Requests are many and varied, and although the photograph you are searching for may not be in the archive, a search is always conducted and often we find just what you were after.

Here are some of the photographs we found for members of the public last year:

Caroline Williamson emailed from Australia, her grandfather was the Welsh politician Siegfried Owen Davies who accompanied the then King Edward around the Dowlais Steel Works in 1936. Her grandfather's file of photographs, taken over the many years he spent as a Member of Parliament, included one of him at Dowlais taken by the Herald photographer Edward Malindine.





Another Australian Stephen Mole contacted us, he was looking for a photograph of his father, Patrick, on the day he emigrated to Australia in 1949. His dad was 14 at the time and kept a diary recording his trip down under. We managed to find a photograph of the whole family as they set sail for Tasmania in time for a family celebration.



Barry Flynn remembered a Daily Herald photographer coming to his house in Liverpool in 1959. The paper was writing an article about the training of police dogs and Barry, aged 8 at the time, was photographed with his father's police dog "Jet" at their Allerton home.



So whether you have a relation who was a Past Miss Ireland, an artist, pilot, sports star, boxing referee or model we may have a photograph of them in the archive. Did your relative play host to Mahatma Gandhi when he toured England in 1931? A Mrs J P Davies did and her photograph is here in the archive.

Did your parents emigrate to New Zealand on board the "Rangitata" in 1947? Were you one of the 14 members of the Jones family of Chatham, Kent who moved to New Zealand in 1960 or one of the many Over-Seas League Child Migrants?

Perhaps you are a member of the Reading based Torpedoes Football Club who emigrated to Australia on masse in 1969. Or one of the Finnegan's from Dublin who in 1966 were bound for Ontario. Or a Templeton from Kingston, Jamaica on their way to the UK. If you think we might have the image you're after contact us and we'll conduct a search for you.

Exploring the museum's secret warehouse

Actually, there are two warehouses, and they're not actually that secret. But our 'offsite stores', full of things we can't fit in the collection rooms at Bradford, are places you won't see on a tour of the museum -- they're too far away, being situated at Black Dyke (a former textile mill a few miles outside of Bradford centre) and Swindon.

Toni Booth from Collections Management was happy to take me on a little guided tour of Black Dyke. It's a foreboding place: floor upon floor of gigantic warehouse that puts you in mind of that final scene from Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Old TVs, movie posters, laserdiscs, computers, TV scenery and props... everywhere you look there's another fascinating treasure from media's past.

I had to keep my hands in my pockets, though. Pretty much everything is snugly smothered in bubblewrap and of course there is no touching on pain of something even more unpleasant than what people get when they open the Ark Of The Covenant.

35mm films. Hundreds of them. If you've seen 35mm film cannisters before, you'll realise that these relatively small discs don't contain enough film for full-length movies. That's because this is our archive of TV commericals.

A box of the original weather symbols used by Yorkshire TV -- in the days before electronic screens became common.

This will trigger memories of Roland Rat and Mad Lizzie for those of a certain age. We've actually got another of these original logo boards from the 1980s TV-AM breakfast show hanging above TV Heaven at Bradford.

Opening up the boxed Akley 35mm Cinecamera: just one object from the Sarosh Collection, which features hundreds of cameras and projectors. We acquired it all just over two years ago.

It's amazing what we found lurking in Black Dyke -- including this, the original animation set-up of animator Bob "Henry's Cat" Godfrey. Donated by Godfrey himself, it comes complete with the Apple II that controlled it all.

There's a store of videodiscs -- the gigantic precursors to DVDs -- at Black Dyke. These aren't the more commonly-known Laserdiscs: they're CEDs, developed by RCA and housed in a non-removable plastic caddy.

Yes, it's the original Dapple from BBC schools programme Playschool. The rest of the gang – Humpty Dumpty, Jemimah and the rest – are on display at TV Heaven in Bradford.

That's all just scraping the surface -- more pictures soon!