This week's pictures from the past

Guessing game over photo of rail station

As often happens, we don't have the date of this old postcard photo showing Tern Hill railway station.

But maybe there are some railway buffs who can narrow things down by the appearance of the locomotive or of the station itself.

Purely for the sake of argument, we'll suggest a 1920s or 1930s date.

This photo comes from Jim Ball of Telford.nextpage

Happily there are quite a few postcards knocking about depicting village post offices from yesteryear and the reason, we imagine, is that the post offices were a natural place to sell the postcards themselves in an era when this was a very popular way to send short messages to relatives or friends. This view is of the post office at Upton Magna and we're going to guess it's from the 1920s.

Picture: Ray Farlownextpage

"Severn & Dolerw, Newtown" says the original caption to this postcard which is undated, but may be from around 1912. Dolerw is the grand house.

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Picture supplied by Sally Anne Richards

We're off to Mid Wales again today to take a look at "Gro Bridge, Newtown". It looks like a fairly rickety footbridge and, so far as we can make out – and we know you'll correct us if we're wrong – it no longer exists.

Where exactly was it? What was it made of? When and why did it disappear (assuming it did)?

This postcard view comes from Park & Son of Newtown and, although it is undated, that firm's postcards seem largely to date from the first decade of the 20th century.

Picture: Sally Anne Richards

A photo of Heath Row, Ightfield, which we carried recently prompted Freda Jones to e-mail us this rather mysterious picture taken in the same village.

Freda says: "I was also pleased to see the postcard of Heath Row as my grandparents and mother, who was born in 1900, lived at number 13.

"I have a postcard marked 'What Remains of Ightfield Post Office?' about the same period.

"Can anyone shed some light as to what happened, as it seems to be a big event."

Well, it's a case of what you see is what you get, and it looks like the building is being demolished. The date looks about the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries – maybe 1905 perhaps? Does anyone out there know what was going on?

This is an extremely rare photo of the old EVW camp in Wellington, which was close to the Blessed Robert Johnson school.

The 1,000 or so men there under the European Voluntary Workers scheme were displaced people from Eastern Europe.These EVWs are unidentified, but were obviously motorcycle mad!

This picture, which dates from between 1947 and 1951, was given to Telford historian Phil Fairclough, who is researching the camps, by the wife of one of the workers who was from the Crimea.

Information about the camps, can be passed to Phil on 01952 417633.

Today we carry a rare picture of the old EVW camp which stood near the Blessed Robert Johnson School in Wellington.

In the post-war period it was home to hundreds of European Voluntary Workers.

Here's another one, from the same source – the wife of one of the workers, who himself came from the Crimea. Effectively stateless, many of those in these camps opted to stay in Shropshire. This photo dates from between 1947 and 1951.