Watford photographer Bob Nunn's legacy on birth centenary

Joseph Robert (Bob) Nunn was born on September 19, 1924 to Joseph, a fitter’s mate at a paper and engineering works, and Gertrude Nunn of 24 Acme Road, Watford. The eldest of seven children, he was brought up in acute poverty. When very young, he was sent to Watford market at the end of a day’s trading to pick up unsold fruit and vegetables and those that fell under the trestle tables. He collected discarded wood from packaging which his mother bundled up for him to sell locally as firewood.

After the family were re-housed at 6 Thorpe Crescent, Oxhey, Bob attended Watford Field School and was later accepted at Watford Grammar School for Boys, but his parents could not afford the uniform. Instead, he went to Victoria Senior Boys’ School where he was a ‘whizz’ at maths. In those early days, he was a keen member of Watford Library and began experimenting with basic photographic imagery.

Young Bob Nunn, early 1930s (Image: Supplied)

Bob’s working life started at 14 years of age at John Dickinson’s Apsley Mills where, after the first winter travelling by train, he cycled every day. When war call up resulted in a shortage of fitters and mechanics, Bob’s responsibilities increased and led him to catch sight of the firm’s process department with its huge cameras and arc lamps. He watched a photographic print being made and judged it ‘absolute magic!’ He was ‘well and truly infected by the photography bug’.

A short engineering course at the Government Training Centre in Sandown Road followed, as did spells at Norman Reeves by High Street Station and Cox’s factory on the Bypass. Army enlistment and duties on the south and east coasts saw Bob with his tiny Super Eljy camera taking ‘Snapshots from the Billet’ for his mates. After lorry driving training at Holmfirth, Yorkshire, he joined the depleted Hampshire Light Signals regiment and, two months after the D-Day landings, was in Arromanches as a motorcycle despatch rider. He recalled that war ‘was very much still on’. A month after V-E Day, he was shipped to India for nearly two years.

Bob with Audientor Award, 2004 (Image: Supplied)

Bob had to wait a long time postwar before being able to purchase a new German-made Leica camera, but that did not stop him photographing the town after his return in 1947. He bought a Super Ikonta camera with compensation after losing a finger on a capstan lathe at De Havilland's. His next job was film printing at Denham Laboratories when he began photographing weddings in his spare time, using a rented bedroom in Cromer Road as a darkroom. When he heard that a run-down studio at 248 St. Albans Road was being let, he leased it and set up his own shop there in March 1951. Weddings became a major part of his freelance work.

In 1957, with freeing of import restrictions, Bob established J.B. Nunn Ltd. at 183 High Street, opposite High Street Station; a poor location in terms of footfall. Never without a camera, he became a co-founder of Watford Cine Society in early 1958 which began with a membership of ten.

22 Woodland Parade with the 'To Let' sign, early 1960s (Image: Bob Nunn)

By 1959 he closed 248 St Albans Road, retaining 183 High Street for processing. After retracting a decision in the early 1960s to lease 177 High Street opposite the Town Hall when ‘design inadequacies’ surfaced, he took a new build unit with a basement for a darkroom opposite the Pond at 22 Woodlands Parade. It was to prove ideal until the late 1960s, when additional space was needed.

Bob was President of Watford Camera Club and the main instigator of the first Book of Watford which marked the club’s Diamond Jubilee in 1963. It comprised a compilation of photographs exhibited at Watford Library that May and covered ‘almost every facet of daily life’ in the town between 1962 and 1963, alongside photographs from the club’s formation year of 1903. Bob took the lead on the photographic exhibition committee; contributed the largest number of photographs to the book, wrote the foreword, designed the layout, published, litho printed and bound it in his Woodlands Parade shop in 1965.

At Pageprint, New Hertford House, Bob on right, 1986 (Image: Supplied)

On January 1 1969, J.B.Nunn (Litho Services) Ltd. moved to the newly-built New Hertford House, on the bridge at 96 St Albans Road, where Bob carried on a brisk trade for nearly 21 years.

In March 1981, he married Linda Pascoe and renamed his company Pageprint after Linda’s maiden name of Page. Together, they printed leaflets for Aeonics, the large duvet company, and Jonathan Fallowfield and Photo Technology Ltd., two photographic suppliers. In 1990, Bob and Linda were paid to move out of New Hertford House after Fishburn Printing Ink left and Sainsbury’s earmarked the land for Homebase. But ironically, the same year, Aeonics closed, owing them the same amount they had been given to move. Linda beams that they were poor ‘but mega rich with each other’.

Bob at Pageprint, New Hertford House with his trusted camera, 1986 (Image: Supplied)

Dedicated throughout his life to photography, Bob became an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society in 1984.

At a visit to a book fair, he bought a copy of W.R. Saunders’ 1931 History of Watford and decided to reprint it in softback. It was the first book he and Linda published jointly in 1986, to which he added photographs, cross-references and an index. He asked my father, Ted Parrish, to write the two-page foreword.

But October 1987 saw the book that, in Linda’s words, ‘captured the heart of Watford’. In preparation for The Book of Watford: A portrait of our town, c1800-1987, Bob spent every evening after work at Watford Library until it closed, taking photos of old Watford Observers which he developed the next day. Bob invited my father to write the early history of the town and received textual contributions from Edgar Chapman and George Lorimer. In addition, he had a slip case edition subscribers’ list to organise. Linda phototypeset every word several times over and recalls the ‘burnout’. The launch was at Dillon’s bookshop in the High Street by Clarendon Road. The book was reprinted in hardback in 1988 and softback in 1992.

Mayor of Watford, Councillor Les Hughes, Linda, Bob and Colin Pascoe with The Book of Watford, 1987 (Image: Supplied)

In early 1992, Bob was preparing a June exhibition at Watford Library. He was working on his High Street shop photographs for display in a 25-foot-long panorama and a montage of colour shots from Boots’ rooftop car park on the corner of the High Street and Market Street, when he suffered a heart attack. But, indefatigable as ever, as soon as he left hospital he continued preparatory work on The Changed Face of Watford exhibition, which proved highly successful.

Bob was also focusing on a companion book to The Book of Watford. The all-too-swift ‘enhancements’: the new Harlequin Centre (atria) and preceding demolition work, new office blocks decimating Clarendon Road, demolitions followed by new retail warehouses lining Lower High Street, the pedestrianisation of much of the High Street and the inevitable additional traffic troubled him greatly. He predicted the urgency ‘would spell a quicker death to the town centre’.

Watford Observer’s cartoonist Terry Challis’ caricature of Bob, 2004 (Image: Supplied)

Bob published The Book of Watford II, Watford from the 1960s in 1996 and included his unique and invaluable ‘in-a-strip’ photographs of every High Street shop frontage. At his request, my father wrote the chapter on Oxhey and Watford Heath before suffering a medical blunder which left him with tunnel vision and unable to read the companion book, which was launched at Waterstones in the Harlequin Centre.

For Watford Past, published in 1999, Bob and Linda undertook the labour-intensive task of delicately adding colour and a new dimension to early black and white photographs of Watford, as well as a selection of Bob’s own postwar shots. It was launched at Watford Museum.

Bob had included a reproduction of the small paper version of John Britton’s 1837 Cassiobury tome in The Book of Watford II. But the pièce de resistance was his magnificent limited edition facsimile of the large paper version, published in 2005.

Bob with Mayor Dorothy Thornhill and Britton’s Cassiobury, 2005 (Image: Supplied)

My own memories of Bob and Linda date from 1985 to 1986 when my father was writing for Bob’s first book. I recall Bob’s dogged determination, dedication and enthusiasm for uncovering and recording Watford’s history for the benefit of all. By the late 1990s, I was taking our daughter to the lovely Linda for her weekly piano lessons at 52 Malden Road.

In 2004 Bob received a newly-initiated Audentior Special Achievement Award from the Mayor of Watford, Councillor Dorothy Thornhill (now Baroness) for his outstanding contribution to the town. He passed away in Watford’s Peace Hospice aged 81 on November 18, 2005 and Linda has no doubt that ‘the word Watford was printed right through him’.

With sincere thanks to Linda Nunn

• Lesley Dunlop is the daughter of the late Ted Parrish, a well-known local historian and documentary filmmaker. He wrote 96 nostalgic articles for the ‘Evening Post-Echo’ in 1982-83 which have since been published in ‘Echoes of Old Watford, Bushey & Oxhey’, available at www.pastdayspublishing.com and Bushey Museum. Lesley is currently working on ‘Two Lives, Two World Wars’, a companion volume that explores her father’s and grandfather’s lives and war experiences, in which Watford, Bushey and Oxhey’s history will take to the stage once again.