Written by John Salim, Station Engineer

Back in early 2009, my friend and retired press photographer Derek Cross told my about finding his ‘lost’ film archive at the back of a drawer, and the many famous people he’d photographed back in the 1960s mostly at the original Southend Odeon cinema in Elmer Approach.

I asked him to bring them over one day, but what he brought made my eyes pop out! His collection of a couple of hundred medium format B&W negatives certainly contained some gems alright. The first thing I did was make contact prints of Derek’s films just to see what we had. Photographs of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Cliff Richard to name but a few were dropping out of the processor every few minutes – and that’s when I thought we should really do something with these special images.

After some editing, I made 1 0″x8″ prints to check the technical quality, and was delighted to see how well most of them held up. Some had degraded after 46 years (due to poor original processing), but the majority looked great.

We’d spoken about how we could get these displayed publicly and finally agreed a proper gallery was the place to do it.

A customer of mine suggested I should go to see John Lidster at the Atelier Gallery in Leigh Broadway. John immediately said he’d like to go through everything with a view of putting on an exhibition later on in the year.

After further editing a final print list was made… and I got busy in the darkroom!

A couple of months later we had around sixty ‘final’ glossy prints in three different sizes to be further edited then framed. This selection led to a major exhibition called ‘Unseen 1963‘ which was held in November 2009.

We’d contacted all the local newspapers as well as radio, we even had ITN come down to film a report (which was shown on three ITV local news bulletins), so coverage was fantastic and our thanks go out to them.

Equally fantastic was Atelier Gallery’s kind offer for us to leave a collection bucket for the duration of the exhibition – plus a raffle prize draw to win prints which raised £225.

Unseen 1963 Prize Draw © John Salim Photographic

As a member of Southend Hospital Radio, John helps to look after the technical side of operations for us. He also runs a local photographic processing service, John Salim Photographic

Update: You may be interested to know that the images exhibited in the exhibition are now available to browse online. To see a selection of these rare images from the Sixties, go to the new Stars in Southend 1963 website.

Handy links:

• Southend Hospital Radio Fundraising
• Stars in Southend 1963 Gallery