So, here we can see (bottom RHS) for once, a page of the famous lost scrapbook or ‘family album’, which disappeared in one of Cantays’ office moves. Heaven knows how many pages there were. This one shows, perhaps, a steam vehicle coming through the archway beneath Tom Tower at Christ Church College, St Aldates, and two other steam traction engine shots. What an incalculable loss! Every picture worth a thousand words.
1976 is 19 years-onwards from the centenary year of 1957, and Monty Gurdon, who is there in the centenary dinner photograph on the left-most table, sitting opposite ‘Miss EG Archer’, my ‘Aunty Elizabeth’, had then worked a mere 35 years for the firm, since 1922, which was very much the time that Fred Archer, my father had also joined the firm from George Blake’s house-furnishing firm in Little Clarendon Street. Possibly Monty came from the same firm, as did H.W. Pike.