Retro: Our own Wild West

David Cliffe • Published 18 Jun 2009 08:00 0 Comments

THIS must be one of the most intriguing photographs I have so far come across whilst sorting out the library"s collection.

It looks a bit like something from the Wild West, but is more likely to have been taken in Caversham.

It belonged to William Wing, the surveyor and architect, who had an office in Bridge Street, Caversham, in the first part of the 20th century.

To the left, we see a wagonette with bench seating, drawn by a single horse, and there is a second horse with a saddle on its back. There are two tents, and to the right, a camp fire with a cooking pot suspended over it. A man in a suit stands by a surveying instrument, and the man to the right holds a bundle of poles with little flags at the top.

None of the four gentlemen in the picture looks like Mr Wing, and I would guess that in any case, Mr Wing could have coped with the small areas of land he had to survey on his own.

I can only think that we must be looking at a team of surveyors from the Ordnance Survey, probably preparing the revision of the large-scale maps that was published in 1911. It seems natural that Mr Wing would take an interest in the surveyors with the latest equipment and using the most modern techniques if they were in the area.

From looking through a history of the OS, I gather that the teams of surveyors often included military men, and that they did sleep in tents when they were in the countryside. The trousers of the man who holds the horse have stripes down the legs and a military look about them.

All this seems a far cry from the man from the Ordnance Survey who knocked on my front door not long ago.

He was carrying a device that looked a bit like a laptop computer. I had assumed that the surveying was done using satellites now, but this man wanted to go into my back garden and look over the fences, to see if any of the neighbours had been building extensions at the backs of their houses!

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This article appeared in Reading Chronicle 18 Jun 09

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