A significant aspect of the Charlie Chadwick archive are the 4,000-5,000 colour transparencies that are currently stored in David’s loft. We have been pondering how best to deal with these and finally we concluded that probably it would be worth our while to invest in a Slide Scanner.

Fortunately a friend had passed on some back copies of PhotoPlus, one of which contained a review of scanners and in the end I was happy to go with their recommendation of the Canon CS5600F Film Scanner. Even better when I was able to pick this up for just £102 from dabs.com. Although there was a small delay getting the order fulfilled – even though you can virtually see the main Dabs warehouse from David’s house – it was recently delivered and although I haven’t yet seen it in operation David seems to be getting the hang of it. The first slide to be scanned is one of Atherton House.

Many of the slides are in poor condition and many of the mounts are rather dirty so it remains to be seen how many of them will be useful to us. The other thing, of course, is that the transparencies come from a different part of Charlie’s life (i.e. post-war) as opposed to his writing and drawing (predominantly from the twenties) so in many ways it seems unlikely that they will be suitable to illustrate Charlie’s stories.