Just before I leave the Falkingham family business, there is another little story….
A few years ago, I was googling our family name (note: I was not googling myself!) when I found a reference on the website of the Yorkshire Film Archive. There was the name “Falkingham” on a list of Bradford shops and small businesses who had commissioned cinema adverts in the early 1930s! A visit to the Yorkshire Film Archive led me to a collection of nine adverts, including a thirty second gem advertising “Falkingham’s Cycles”. These short animations advertise a ‘fashion house’, baker’s shop, painter and decorator, optician and several others. The Falkingham advert is certainly nothing to write home about! A man on a bike crashes into a pig and ends up in a heap! The message is “Don’t buy a dud! When you can obtain a reliable cycle from Falkingham’s of Carlisle Road”. How punchy is that? It hardly trips off the tongue like “1,2,3 Sofology” or Kevin Bacon advertising ‘EE’ (there’s a bacon connection there, somewhere) but it is, at the very least, a piece of family history and a piece of cinema history. I now have the DVD to hold for posterity. Thank you Yorkshire Film Archive!
I’m going on holiday next week. So I am going to take a break while I embark upon the obligatory few days of panic! My girls know how this can take hold of me and how, sometimes, one or the other has to come and calm me down while I pack (and sometimes unpack and pack again). I try to remind myself that I often used to work, come home and organise a husband and 3 children, pack the car (we always travelled by car) and depart for a trip to France but that was then and this is now!
Anyway, packing permitting and at the request of some friends, who decided they want to read about my travels, One Anne and Her Dog will be going ON TOUR (without the dog)!
STARTS SUNDAY!!
One Anne and Her Dog 