14 December 2020

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch joins the colours.

For their first hundred plus years, photographs were, of necessity, black and white (or, more properly, monochrome). Thus, we have come to associate such pictures with ‘the past’ and the result is that we find it difficult to empathise with them. Strangely, this even applies to images of places, subjects and people that we are familiar with. The past is a foreign country partly because it largely exists in grayscale, not in our actual world of colour.

Today of course, we have the technology to ‘colourise’ historical monochrome pictures. This process can be very powerful, particularly when applied to images of people, it humanises the shadowy figures and they become flesh and blood – particularly in the case of real blood. For example, colourising black and white pictures of dead soldiers turns them from historical casualties into mothers’ sons. Colourisation forces us to see history as something that happened to real people.

Colourisation is not without its critics and some say it rewrites history, but others see it as a complement rather than a replacement. Also, the effectiveness of a particular piece of colourisation is often determined by how well it is done – the standard of the results of this complex work varies enormously.

When moving pictures are colourised, the result can be particularly effective. They Shall Not Grow Old is a 2018 documentary by Peter Jackson (director of the Lord of the Rings films) created using original film footage of the First World War digitally colourised and improved. I was particularly fascinated by the rotten teeth now clearly on display. Audio post-production added sound effects, lip-synced actor’s voices to the silent pictures using regional accents appropriate to the regiment’s recruiting area and included voice-over archive interviews with ex-servicemen. The three-minute trailer below demonstrates the result.

I know of no old rowing films that have been colourised but there are a few still photographs of crews on the Internet that have been digitally brought to life.

Finally, below is a picture that I think begs to be colourised. It is a high-resolution shot of the Leander crew that won the Olympic Eights in Stockholm in 1912. If anyone can do this, remember that the caps, scarves, socks, tie, hat band and piping on the dirty white vests are cerise in colour. The cox sitting in the front, Ben Wells, is wearing his Oxford blazer, dark blue with a dark blue trim. Ewart Horsfall (third from the right) seems to be wearing socks of a darker colour than the others – they could be his dark blue Oxford hosiery. Leslie Wormald (third from left) does not seem to be wearing a Leander cap. He rowed for Eton, OUBC and Magdalen College. Most likely it is an Eton cap, though not the famous light blue of the First Eight, Wormald was only in the second boat. A chance to rewrite history perhaps?