Jim Wood Photography

14/08/2026

More from Dad’s Archive.
It’s the 4th June 1967. “Silence is Golden” by the Tremeloes is number 1 in the charts and Dad is 24.
A Canadair C-4 Argonaut passenger aircraft owned by British Midland Airways operating as British Midland Flight 542 crashed near the centre of Stockport, Cheshire, England. Of the 84 people on board, 72 were killed. It becomes the fourth-worst accident in British aviation history. Within an hour, hundreds of onlookers, sightseers, and people on motorbikes crowded the surrounding streets, complicating the frantic rescue operation. Along with his boss at Stockport News Photo Agency Jimmy Lovelock, Dad was dispatched to get the shots, which would be syndicated to the national daily newspapers and the local Manchester Evening News. They would have seen the thick column of black smoke rising above the rooftops long before they arrived at the crash site. The Canadair C-4 Argonaut had come down on a small patch of open ground known as Hopes Carr, barely missing rows of tightly packed residential houses. The aircraft had broken into pieces, hitting a garage building and bursting into a violent ball of fire.

13/08/2026

Drapers Lane in Leominster looking oh so pretty.

09/08/2026

More from Dad’s archive.

Dad is 83 now, so it seems particularly fitting to share this one.

It was 1961, and Dad was just 18 years old when he photographed another man who was 83 — Jim Clarke, Stockport’s only hand key cutter.

Jim had started in the trade at the age of just 11, back in 1899 and by the time Dad photographed him, he had spent more than six decades cutting keys by hand.
The photograph was published in the Manchester Evening News, capturing a moment when an old-fashioned skill was already becoming a disappearing trade.

More than sixty years later, Dad is now the same age Jim Clarke was when he stood in front of Dad’s camera.
And somehow, that makes this photograph feel even more special.

08/08/2026

Going to be sharing some of my Dads archive for him. He was 17 when he got his first big break as a press photographer. The date was Wednesday 12th October 1960, Ricky Valance’s Tell Laura I Love Her was in its 3rd week at number 1. Dad was 17, he had been working for the Stockport News Photo Service near Manchester for a few months. The 3:50pm train from Manchester Piccadilly had been making its way to New Mills, Derbyshire some 15 miles away, it crashed into the back of a freight train after the driver went through a stop sign. Dad was dispatched on his scooter with his Minoltacord and plate camera to get the shots. The story was picked up by the Daily Mirror and a few other nationals.

25/07/2026

River Wye in Hereford so low you can see the river bed

09/06/2026

One rainbow leads to the Priory church and the other to the nearly complete brand new medical centre in Leominster

29/03/2026

28/03/2026

Up on the Long Mynd in Shropshire.

23/03/2026

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