The social history of Belfast has been vividly documented in pictures by The Friar's Bush Press. Not that the city lacked serious history in the long view, with volumes like Benn and today Bardon and others. These Friar's Bush productions have been pictorial, mostly in small softbacks of about 80 pages; pictures and captions, and an introduction. Arthur Campbell's incomparable, intimate snapshots of the city - and parts farther away - in a collection, Return Journey 1936 to 1939, has just been reissued. He wrote: "I unwittingly recorded some social history. It did not occur to me in my days as a novice that I might be photographing for generations to come." He reminds us, too, that behind what now might be regarded as romantic memories there were the scourges of tuberculosis on a large scale and terrible unemployment with its hunger. The war of 1939, he notes ironically, "raised our living standards". He was not a professional photographer. Many of his pictures had to be "shot from the hip". His camera was small and he never had anything in mind but the making of a personal archive. so what we see is unposed. Was Dublin very like this, with its milk, coal and grocery deliveries all by horse and cart? It must have been. Here are two little boys at a street drinkingfountain - i.e., an iron construction about four feet high, from which you drank by pressing a button or knob which sent up a small jet of water. And did Dublin have as many horse troughs? A lot must have been needed. The first motor car to be sold at £100 was the Ford Popular. Arthur snaps one passing the imposing City Hall. Dolce far niente he writes, as one lad drives the pony cart while the other reclines on a pile of empty sacks. Coke was cheap at two pence a sack; two very small boys wheel a sackful in a handcart of their own making.
In 1937 he photographed "probably the last barrel-organ in Belfast". Surely not. Hope not. Anyway, they went on longer in Dublin. Harry Ferguson demonstrates one of his early tractors in a field, in May 1938. And, outdoors, members of the Holiday Fellowship and Youth Hostellers enjoy the Mournes and the Antrim hills. Lovely pictures of trees and water on the Lagan and Minnowburn (what a name). Walter Rush, slim, young, smiling, lapped the Clady motorcycle course at more than 100 miles an hour - the first to do so, in 1937. He died the following year. The Causeway Tram, street jugglers, the great bird market of Gresham Street, Arthur got them all. Sterling £5.99.