The Delights of Vintage Photographs. Tommy Cooper and Mount Radford School Exeter.

Poliakoff drama about photographic archives, with Timothy Spall and Lindsay Duncan, came out in 1999 that I was so enraptured by it.

KA Perratt.

Weekly we see the past recreated to varying degrees of authenticity on television, a reverie of nostalgia which fuels the imagination of modern evolution.

But it is the old photograph that simply cannot be surpassed and the stories it tells. Captured in a click in these photographs of Radford College are mid-teenagers at the prime of physical fitness, privileged, it is an independent school, competitive, full of life and high expectations of the future.

What I love most about these photographs is how the cricketers all look swatty and posh and the footballers more fun and grounded. Within the exclusive school you have the differences of the class system, the cricketers probably old money, from the establishment and the footballers new money, businessmen.

You need to weigh up the evils of the internet with the glories of the internet, where you can augment your thoughts with some real history. You can burrow into fantastic worlds of knowledge with such ease now.

As you delve into the past such interesting things spring up.

Radford College is in Exeter and the most famous former pupil was the musician and comedian Tommy Cooper. Even more interesting is that in Wikipedia he is noted as a Wesh prop. As he was born in 1921 and these photos are dated 1936 to 1938 these would have been his sporting peers. He was at Radford at the time.

I like to get lost in these things but not obsessive as it ruins the moment for me.

With the timeline and their ages, they stand for the capture of the glorification of their endeavours ,seemingly with their  lives in front of them. Blissfully unaware of the rise of Hitler, cocooned in privilege in the West Country, who knows how many of them were slaughtered in the Second Word War?

For many of them the halcyon days of sporting success and privilege will soon meet the great eqaliser, conflict, where bullets and bombs do not recognise class.

It did not take the sleuthing talents of Poirot to work out at least one who survived the war. K.A.Perratt is the only person present in all photographs, so these are almost certainly his. Resplendent in his glasses in the cricket photograph and without in the football photograph. As two other players had glasses in the cricket photograph perhaps it was considered de rigeur at the time!

1938 is the year my mother and father were born, one reflects on those two little babies when the 1937-38 season photograph was taken. My dad was probably six months old and my mother two months old.

It's a saying with death, isn't it, that you only really die when those who remember you and hold you dear have died too.

Mr Perratt statistically maybe died towards the end of the 20^th century. His son or daughter would have taken charge of the photographs. If they were close to their dad, they would have affectionately nurtured them and if they were not that keen but felt obliged and that it would be a bit crappy to chuck them away, stuck them in a garage. Hence the foxing maybe.

So, they end up eventually in a country auction in Sussex, a clearance auction, so maybe one of his children had passed.  The beloved photos of his schooldays now paraded on Etsy as an item of quirky interest. You can feel sad that at the end of the day we simply become forgotten.  A name on a grave. Or you can be pragmatic, hey ho, that is how it is. Eventually the paraphernalia we live with all our lives and means so much ends up in auctions, at vintage fairs and sadly these days as old things are cherished less…the tip.