Warminster Museum column – Summer Holiday

This is another one of the many great pictures that we have in the museum. The sun is high, the direction of the shadows suggests about 11am, and it really is all going on.

The many coaches have luggage racks on their roofs, so a lot of people must be planning to go somewhere and stay there for a while.

It is all very exciting. It can only be the Saturday at the start of August Bank Holiday week – the day that everybody has been looking forward to for a year. But what year?

The slight problem with many of our most interesting photographs is that they are not dated and they rarely have a title. This is why we can only be “almost certain” that this picture is the first Saturday of August Bank Holiday Week and the clues to “what year?” will have to be in the photograph.

The closest car to the camera looks like a short radiator Ford 8. This model was being produced between August 1932 and October 1933.

What about the dresses that the ladies are wearing? Those ladies in the middle distance are wearing the style of the late 1920s and the early 1930s but the well-dressed lady in the floral dress, who is walking under the Garage sign, is wearing the much closer-fit style that was introduced in the early 1930s.

Perhaps there is a clue in the weather. It seems that throughout the 1930s, the weather at the start of August was very bad but one year bucked that trend. Early August 1935 was bathed in glorious sunshine. It did not last long but it was a great start.

All the obvious clues suggest that this photograph was taken on Saturday 3rd of August, 1935.

Your Hon. Curator can vouch for some of the bad weather. At August Bank Holiday Week 1939, I was three months short of my seventh birthday. We were on holiday at Hayling Island and the weather was so bad that we gave up the struggle and came home on the Thursday. Our car? A Clyno.

Pictured: Bank Holiday 1935