My ageing uncle recently gave me an old camera. An Agfa Isolette. This was the story that went with it.
As a young boy in 1949 he traveled back home to England from Jordan where his father (my grandfather) had started Air Jordan and Arab Airways after the war. As he was leaving the plane at Heathrow he saw a camera on the seat across the aisle from him and picked it up. He dutifully handed the camera in at the airline desk in the terminal.
No-one had reported a missing camera so after a month he received the camera in the post from the airline with a letter explaining that as he had found it he could keep it.
He tells me that he had only used it a little, the last time being in the early 1970’s.
When I got home I opened the camera and found a film in it: Kodacolor II.
So I developed the film in C- 41 chemicals and to my surprise found that the images were still ok. Here is one of them, out of focus but pretty good quality after over 40 years!
Kodacolor II was introduced in 1972. Judging from some of the other pictures showing Fuengirola in Spain, the film seems to have been taken in 1974.
My uncle has no memory of this girl with a dog, but she would now be about 60 years old.
