When we first decided to go to repeat Grandpa's journey to Shanghai we had told a friend Jeremy about it and he thought that the story might be of interest to some of the contacts he had made during his long career in the media.
He put us in touch with Mike Ford who we met about three weeks ago in Plymouth. Mike offered to lend us a video camera to take with us to China to record the trip. We met him last weekend so he could teach Tone how to use the camera and we decided to use it to record our visit to see my Cousin Cathy.
Cathy lives near Wadebridge, with Rick, and her dad Jim was my dads brother so was also born in Shanghai. I don't think we had seen each other for about 30 years but it was as if it was yesterday and it was wonderful to see her again.
Cathy's brother Johnny came down from Bridport too so it was a great reunion although Rick and Tone were at times underwhelmed by us trawling through album after album and recalling times we had when we were young and things we remember our dads telling us about Shanghai when they were there.
Cathy had three trunks of stuff and Johnny brought a big laundry box full of photos with him so there were hundreds of not thousands of pics to look at.
There is one album from 1904 in Barry showing Grandpa and his brother and a visit from the King and Queen to Cardiff!
Other albums show pics from Grandpas first month in Shanghai and there is one with him and Granny (Miss Dunne) lounging on the grass and the caption is !!!!!
We had hoped Cathy would find an old cine film we knew existed but she only found a small reel which I am having transferred to a CD. We don't know what is on it. A mystery.
Cathy has lent me twelve albums of photos and I am just starting to look through them. The photos are stuck firmly into the albums so I am taking photos of them and then printing them onto photographic paper. This seems to work well and means that once I have sorted out what is useful and what I want to record I can get to work. About a months work I think.
As Cathy and I were looking though the trunks Tone practised his filming and Rick sloped of to do something more interesting. Poor fellow. I hope the next time we meet I will have more to say to him that is not Granny did this and Grandpa did that etc etc etc.
We had a great time and I will keep you posted about what I find.
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