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Richard A. Taylor 1934 - 2007
Born
in 193 4
in
to Albert & Gladys Taylor
Folkestone,
the family home became the Welfare Unit at Shorncliffe where Albert ("Cloggy")
was stationed with the Queens Bay Horse Guards.
Richard was educated at the prestigious Canterbury
Tech and upon leaving went to Hawksworth Wheeler as an apprentice photographer.
He was called up for his national service in the
early 1950s and finalised his apprenticeship in the Royal Engineers specialist
photographic unit, later serving in Suez during the crisis and Cyprus.
He rejoined Hawksworth Wheeler on leaving and meeting
Pam they later married and set up their own
business and became the best in town by far....in fact look closely and you'll
see his Mini Cooper 233 RKN in many of the archive photos!
They were really quite successful in this period, I can see that very well from
the archive I hold, so many different jobs (over 7000) weddings, portraits,
groups, commercial etc etc etc.....and it shows clearly that Folkestone was a
busy little town then!
When the business failed due to a culmination of reasons not least of which was
the rapid growth in amateur photography, at the end of the 1960s he worked for a
brief time for BMW in Dover.
He then became salesman for a local garage, a purveyor of three-wheeled and
Japanese cars. That company hit bad times with the advent of the 1970s fuel
crisis and he convinced the owner to drop the three-wheelers and take on an
alternative and expanding Japanese brand. Thus he became one of the driving
forces behind the growth of that business.
The proprietors sons later joined and the positive ethos of the company
changed. Behaving like cuckoos in a nest they turned internal conflict into a
fine art and turned on my father. They are not forgiven for what they tried to
do to my family I'm afraid..
Anyway, following the split with the above, together with my mother they
restarted the photography proper in the mid 1980s with Whitecliffe Photographic
and things began did rather well until her tragic death in 1990.
A few years after he married Doris and relocated to Brittany in France, taking
the archive with him. Following his untimely death in December 2007 Doris
kindly returned that massive archive to me and it is now proudly available via
myself. |
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