Last week, I asked you what historical events or places you’d like us to look for in The Courier’s archives.
We received plenty of excellent ideas in the comments, on Facebook and on Twitter, and eventually we hope we can research them all.
But I had to start somewhere – so where better than the well-remembered Timex strike of 1993? Thanks to Joe Boyle for the suggestion.
The first step, as you might expect, was research: What happened? When? Who was involved? This can mostly be done online these days thanks to the increasing digitisation of sources, though our print archives were always on hand if they were needed.
Armed with the facts, I was then able to head down to our photography archive. It’s an intimidating room full of envelope-stuffed shelving; the envelopes are packed full of photos in turn. The only way to find anything is through an index card system, which is organised by location. Thankfully I was only looking for pictures from one place, and a quick flick through the cards for “Timex factory” turned up a list of candidates.
Having retrieved a cache of plump envelopes, I settled down to examine their contents. Several of them contained generic images of watches that I could discard right away; others were streets, parks and people that warranted a closer look. One pack, somewhat bizarrely, appeared to consist solely of awkward promotional shots of 1980s technology – lots of smiling women holding clunky home computers.
Several hours and hundreds of photos later the result is our gallery, which comprises 17 of our favourites.
We hope they’re interesting – let us know what you think, and keep your suggestions coming for future topics.