BACK in 1990, Arnold Kemp, the editor of this newspaper, previewed Dear Happy Ghosts, an exhibition and book of some of the finest photographs from our extensive archives. Among them was the image seen on the right, which was taken in Glasgow 75 years ago.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, accompanied by his wife Clementine, was seen and heard by an estimated half-million Glaswegians on an election tour through bunting-dressed streets in the city. The war in Europe had ended the previous month.
Here, Kemp observed, “we see Winston Churchill savouring his popularity during a visit to Glasgow in June, 1945, only a week before the watershed post-war General Election.
“There is no sense here that the country, while recognising his greatness as a war leader, was about to eject him from office and inaugurate the Attlee era. (Even so the Conservatives secured 41% of the Scottish votes and 27 of the Scottish seats.)
“Who is the woman running after his car with such happiness, joy even, on her face? Someone, somewhere may know, and may even write to tell us. If she is still alive we hope she will forgive us if we say that in a way her identity does not matter. She is an image, a face in a dream.
"In her book On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag said: ‘A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’.
“Footprints and traces – that is what these photographs are, of the changing scene, of social, political and economic history", Kemp continued. "What they do not represent is a systematic account of their times. That we must leave to the academics and the novelists: perhaps only in fiction may truth be approached".
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