Seventy-five years after the event it’s almost impossible to imagine what it would have been like for Portlanders to be awoken in the early hours of Tuesday 6 June 1944 by the din of 30,000 American servicemen preparing to be shipped across the Channel to launch the Normandy landings, D-Day. As dawn broke on The Read More…
Tag: Portland
Art of glass
It is the best part of fifty years since a school careers master told the sixteen-year-old Jon Callan that he wasn’t really suited to the world of work. ‘He was possibly the most perceptive teacher I ever encountered,’ says Jon in the airy kitchen of the Dorchester home that a lifetime of ‘not working’ has Read More…
Picture perfect – Weymouth’s camera man
A dozen or so cardboard boxes, many without lids, sit on shelves at Dorset History Centre waiting to surrender their secrets. They contain some 7000 packets of negatives that effectively constitute the last 30 years of photographer Graham Herbert’s working career in and around Weymouth – an important visual record of everyday life from a Read More…
b-side, not just the seaside
Since 2008, the biennial b-side festival has sought to cast a different light on the Weymouth and Portland area, provoking double takes and scratched heads from locals and visitors alike with what festival producer Sandy Kirkby describes as its ‘quirky interventions’ on sometimes overlooked sites. Previously these have included lines of overheard speech flashed on Read More…