A vast photographic archive charting the postwar recovery of Coventry has been published online ten years after it was saved from a skip.
The pictures chart the city’s rebuilding after the devastating Blitz by the Luftwaffe, as well as the visits of celebrities and royals, festivals and simple weddings.
More than 8,000 images taken by Arthur Cooper, a local press photographer, between the 1940s and 1960s are now being opened up to members of the public in order to help them catalogue the thousands of people and places captured within them.
“As soon as I opened the files I thought ‘this is just marvellous’,” Martin Williams, chairman of the Friends of Coventry Cathedral, told the BBC. “There were just thousands of images with no information on.”
Members of the public have started to provide details for the pictures as part of a project run by Coventry University.
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The photographic plates were salvaged from a skip after Cooper’s family organised a clearout, but they were spotted and sent to the Coventry Telegraph. The local paper later passed them on to an archivist for the publishing company Mirrorpix where they remained until now.
They add important new glimpses of the city, which suffered the most concentrated night of bombing unleashed by the Luftwaffe in 1940, destroying Coventry Cathedral and burning large parts of the city. There is a picture of a service being held in the cathedral ruins in 1946 and of workers still clearing the rubble there in 1948.
Many of the photographs depict the postwar rebuilding projects, charting the dramatically changing face of the city.
Vast numbers of photographs from weddings and other events have the potential to greatly enhance personal family histories. Ten thousand people a month have been accessing and sharing the images via the Coventry Digital platform.
There are pictures of the then Princess Elizabeth, her father George VI and the Queen Mother. There are also images of celebrities such as Ken Dodd, Jimmy Hill and the young Morecambe and Wise mucking about with the Goon Harry Secombe.
