These photographs are from the family collection, and both date from the period of the First World War.
One shows my great-aunts, Annie and Jane, standing in the street with Ann, the woman who brought them up. It shows, apparently, one of the rolls of honour or street shrines common in Hull's streets and terraces during the First World War.
The other photograph shows the same two young girls, Annie and Jane, with their father, Martin, and their older sister Doris. It was taken around 1918, and Martin is in uniform, having fought in the war.
Martin came back, but Fred Higinbotham, uncle to the young girls, was lost in the war, in 1917.
I think the street shrine may have been at Abbey Crescent or Wainfleet Terrace, rows of houses that are long since gone, once two terraces that continued on from one another along the same line heading north from Fountain Road. Many of the Lamb family lived at Abbey Crescent for decades. Or it could be near Ada's Terrace, St Paul's Street, where Fred Higinbotham's parents lived. Perhaps that's why they're standing by it, here on this particular day, a date unknown now.
I've had these photos for years, but it's only through researching family history that they have regained their proper significance. The old photos gain an extra poignancy when you fill in the background, and thread together the details of the individual lives pictured.
These people are struggling through the First World War, not imagining that there will be another one, with direct and devastating effects on these streets they're standing in. Or that after losing so many members of one generation of men, they'll lose so many of another generation. Annie, who is just a young girl in these photos, is many years away from being old enough to marry. When she does, she marries Walter Clayton. She loses him in the Second World War, in the Dunkirk rescue.