WGRA Family picnic: 1930s:

An Archer family picnic believed to be in the inter-war years, say 1936, which would make my Aunty Nora (my father Fred Archer’s 3-years-younger sister, seen here in the flower-print dress near the front at the LHS) about 28, and her father, WGRA (who is in the somewhat-reclining position on the extreme LHS), about 58, and his wife (my grandma Lizzie) about 60, which looks about correct. Nora doesn’t look very happy with something about the picnic. She is sandwiched, perhaps somewhat uncomfortably, between her father and his elder brother Ernest (in the ‘Alf Garnett’ glasses, and bracers), who was doubtless on one of his many ‘automotive sales’ trips to the UK. I would love to know who the other people in this shot are? Presumably family friends. Are the two young men ‘boy-friends’ of Noras? Perhaps not, judging from the body-language generally. Sadly, I suppose, we shall never know. (17.2.16.nz).

(Added later same day): About the (guessed) date of the above: I think it must be earlier than 1936, because Grandma Lizzie (whom I never met) died in about November 1936 (from memory) after at least a slightly prolonged illness based on (breast?) cancer, following (probaby very primitive, because very new, then) radio-therapy. So perhaps this was much earlier in the 1930s, and Aunty Nora was perhaps only in her middle-twenties. And this might, accordingly have been somewhat before (but not all that long) the shot of Eileen and Pam Archer, who were Nora’s nieces, and WGRA’s grandchildren. 

qaa© Philip B Archer 2014