Reflections of Liverpool exhibition is a candid snapshot of the past

When Bob Howells died in 1999, he left his grandson Steven a couple of cameras along with a tin of film negatives and glass slides.

Little can he have imagined that nearly 30 years later the images on those rolls would be blown up and on display in an exhibition on the Liverpool waterfront.

Reflections of Liverpool: The Howells' Family Album, which runs at the Museum of Liverpool until September, captures his young family at home and play - and Bob Howells' colleagues at Campbell and Isherwood, the engineering firm in Bootle where he worked.

The exhibition came about after Steven Howells finally got round to examining the contents of the tin he had been left and discovered this treasure trove of images of 1940s and 1950s Liverpool.

“I’d printed a couple of them out for myself, but I hadn’t had them all scanned in,” says Steven, who now lives in Leeds. “It’s just one of those things. Back then it was a lot harder to find out where to get the glass negatives scanned.

“I was at art college. That’s one of the reasons they were passed to me, because I’d done a bit of photography at university and my dad knew I’d really like them. I really loved them, but it didn’t cross my mind (then) to get them scanned in and made for everyone.”

When he finally did decide to return to the treasure trove, his first move was to have the photographs printed and turned into a book, purely as a keepsake for his own family. That initial book has now formed the basis for a complementary exhibition guide also put together by Steven.

Above: Bob Howells (photographer unknown). Top: His fellow workmates at Campbell and Isherwood in Bootle.

“Then once I’d pulled in all together (for the family book) I thought someone like the museum might be interested in having a look,” he explains. “I thought what have I got to lose? So I sent them a speculative email, and they got in touch and really loved what they saw and wanted to put on an exhibition. That was about a year ago.”

Now here we are.

Bob Howells was born in Anfield, and spent much of his adult life in Kensington where he lived in a two-up, two-down terraced home in Sinclair Street with wife Gert and their three children – Fran, Dave (Steven’s father) and Bob Jr.

It was there the keen amateur photographer turned a wardrobe into a tiny home-made dark room and developed the photos he took.

Among the images on show at the Museum of Liverpool - which provide a rare and fascinating insight into working class life in Liverpool in the 50s - are photographs of workers at the engineering works, and images of Bob’s children at home and neighbours in the street. There are also a pair of photographs taken at the lifelong Evertonian's beloved Goodison.

Above: A slideshow of Bob Howells' photographs from Reflections of Liverpool.

There is also a photo of teenage daughter Fran with her young friends Jean and Betty at Butlins in Pwllheli in 1951. Too young to go alone, Fran was accompanied by the whole family who six years after the war still had to pack ration cards along with their holiday gear.

Fran, who is 90 this year and now lives down south, is due to visit the exhibition this weekend with her brothers Bob and Dave, nephew Steven and several generations of other family members.

Despite Steven studying photography as part of a university course, he doesn't recall ever hearing his grandfather talk about his own passion for taking photos.

So what does he think Bob would make of the exhibition?

"I think he’d love it," Steven says. "My dad said he’d be made up. I think he’d be really surprised – he was just snapping away as a hobby more than anything. He’d be really surprised we’d made it into something like this."

Reflections of Liverpool: The Howells' Family Album is at the Museum of Liverpool until September.