Hardwicke Knight

Picturing the Past: NarrowBoat, Spring 2015

David Blagrove

NarrowBoat is delighted to be able to reproduce colour slides of British Waterways narrowboats in the early 1950s taken by the famous New Zealand photographer

Colour photographs of working narrowboats in the 1950s are rare, so NarrowBoat was delighted to spot these wonderful images on the Facebook page entitled A Waterways Heritage – Canal Connections and Family History. They were posted by Dave Murray who owned the slides. He did not however own the copyright, but had been given permission to post them online. The photographs were taken by the famous New Zealand photographer Frederick Hardwicke Knight (1911– 2008). Knight spent his formative years in England, and in France in the 1920s, before becoming a travelling photographer working throughout Europe, notably spending time as a photojournalist in Stalinist Russia. In 1948, he was appointed Director of Medical Photography at Enfield Hospital in England, and in 1957 he emigrated to New Zealand where he published many authoritative books on photography. It is fortunate for us today that he spent at least some of his time in England visiting the Grand Union Canal around Boxmo…