Four people inside V C Jones on Harbour Street

I‘ve been going through a box of family photographs, the kind that gets moved from house to house and never sorted. This one was near the bottom, face down, with a pencil mark on the back I still can’t read.

It’s the inside of V C Jones at 25 Harbour Street — my family’s old fish and chip restaurant. The family sold it a few years ago and it trades as Harbour Street Fish Bar now, still frying fish, and the room inside has barely changed.

Fish Lunches and Fish Suppers painted straight onto the window glass, read backwards from where the photographer was standing. Formica tables, bentwood chairs, a chrome coffee machine the size of a small engine, and tins stacked in a pyramid on the shelf by the door.

There are four people in it. A man working the counter in a dark peaked cap. A man in a flat cap standing at the back. A woman standing in a light overall, looking straight at whoever was holding the camera. And a woman having her lunch, with her shopping bag on the floor beside her chair.

My grandparents might have known who every one of them was. They’ve been gone a few years now and my parents don’t know.

So I’m asking the town instead.

The people

The evidence

What can be read off the photograph itself, before anyone tells me anything.

What’s written on the back

A pencil mark in three parts. I can make out a w, then a 6 between two slashes, then two characters I can’t settle at all. If it’s a date it would be June of something — but I’m not certain it is a date rather than a print reference or a filing code.
If you can read it better than I can, that’s as useful as a name.

The same mark with the contrast increased so it can be read. Nothing else has been altered.

Where it came from

My family’s own collection. No caption, no album.

The case log

• • 6 September
    The date is settled. A man of ninety-nine whose family ran the shop before mine has looked at the photographs and says they are from my family’s time, after 1962. He also says the only person his family employed there was a Mrs Pike, who isn’t in the picture. That closes the question of whether this predates my grandparents.

• 6 September
  Three people have now offered the same name for the woman standing — Muriel Watson. Two of them came to it independently and one is her granddaughter. That’s the first identification here with more than one source behind it. The man behind the counter has two possible names, so he stays open.
• 5 September
  Two possible names have come in. The man behind the counter may be Len, who worked in the shop with my grandfather. The woman standing has been suggested as two different people. Both are family memory rather than record, so neither goes on this page as a name yet. Someone who was there in the 1950s, now ninety-nine, is being shown the photographs.
• 4 September
  Several readers connect the restaurant to Mr and Mrs W Thomas, who ran it before my family took it on. One remembers Friday suppers there in the late 1950s. Another, whose parents owned it, doesn’t recognise anyone in the photograph. My mum says my grandparents Viv and Joyce Jones took the business on in 1962. Both dates I have are family memory rather than record, and I’m trying to settle it properly.
• 3 September
  Case opened. Four people, no names, no date.

Harbour Street today

Number 25 is still a fish and chip restaurant. It trades as Harbour Street Fish Bar.

Not photographed yet.

What I still don’t know

If you recognise a face, remember the room, or can read that pencil mark — we’d love to hear.

If you’re connected to anyone in this photograph and would rather it wasn’t here, email me and I’ll take it down.