David Newbitt’s Nostalgia


This is David, bravely operating a Pedalo boom

David says –

“One of the great pleasures I have enjoyed since joining the Tech-Ops group has been the opportunity to see so many photographs from the 60s & 70s. Where they include many faces I find typically I instantly identify a proportion of them, add to the list with a lot of head scratching then fail badly with the remainder. It is this last group that sends me off on Google hunts, the results of which at times stir up synapses and have me realising that, after all, I do have a recollection.  

One that has particularly engaged me recently is on http://www.tech-ops.co.uk/page47.html , a photo posted in 2002 by John Holmes, from 1962 (the year I joined Tech Ops). It is a remarkable collection of the movers and shakers from the Light Entertainment world of the era. John describes it as ‘memorable’ which if anything is an understatement. He provides a list of the just short of 60 subjects across 7 rows (just a few with identity as ?)  and it reads like the Who’s who of the era. I did however find dotting back and forth from photo to key had me losing the thread so I took the liberty of saving the photo to my PC and annotating the individuals for easier analysis. Many of you will perhaps not have re-visited the post for some time so I am attaching my effort for any that care to do so now.  

In many cases, even where I instantly recognised the face, I googled to get a broader picture of the particular career. Robin Nash was one where the info that came to light came as a complete surprise to me – he was apparently born Robert Henry Douglas Drane but adopted the name Robin for some reason plus the surname Nash which was his mother’s maiden name. I gather her side of the family had show-biz connections but whether that signified or not I didn’t discover.   Just a small point – the key for 5th row shows three ‘unidentified’ between Pauline Kay and Colin Farnell but It looks as though this should only be two.   So there we are, so many people whose contribution is undoubted – many of them no longer with us but definitely not forgotten. “

And here is David’s update –