My mother must have acquired this camera soon after WW2. She saved up the coupons which were given with Kensitas cigarettes and when she had collected enough she sent them off and the camera was the result. She used it very effectively for the next 12 years or so.

The brand name of the camera is Coronet. As a camera, it could not be a much simpler piece of technology. I guess it was very similar to the original Brownie Box camera. The roll of film was about 650mm wide. You could get some really excellent photos from this old camera, but it was only really effective if you took the photos on a bright sunny day. There was no means of using a flash. It is still in excellent condition, I believe it could probably still take very good photos if we could buy the film to fit it.

There was a lot of interest in photography in my mother’s family. Her father, Tom Myers, was a keen amateur photographer and used to process his own prints. When I was a child, my mother still had some of the old photographic equipment that had belonged to her father, and she showed me how to use it. You took the big old negatives and put them in a frame with the photo paper. You could then expose it for a few seconds in the sun, then rush inside and put the print into the chemicals to fix it. The prints all came out in brown tonings.

The film that my mother used came from a firm called Gratispool, ( because when you sent in a film to be processed, they sent you a free film in return.)

I have always been glad that we had this dear old camera as it has provided us with a detailed record and many happy memories of our family life in the 1950s.