As soon as the paint was dry in the set of offices and the studio at Blackfriars I started work. It was an interesting job, but not very well paid.

We were all young – the dark-room man was eighteen, the office boy fifteen, and I was soon doing a bit of everything not actually involving taking and processing photographs.

Most important, during the first few weeks, I kept the accounts, and visited the bank weekly to draw all our wages. I had to produce each week, too, a truthful graph which went up, not down, to be studied by our source of finance – not always easy as in the beginning of course we were losing money – thus enabling Mr Denes to touch his partner’s father for enough to keep us going.

I never used my shorthand as Mr Denes’ English was not good enough to be worth taking down. He told me what he wanted to say and I wrote the letter. We also wrote a book together on Cloud Photography. We got a photograph in The thousand best photographs of the year – of two poached eggs on toast which took us all of two days as the studio lights were very hot. Each time I buttered the toast and arranged the two glittering poached eggs Denes would say “Hold on a minute” and adjust the focus or lights – and the toast would dry and curl, the eggs film with a wrinkled skin. I don’t remember eating any of the rejects.

We had two huge metal filing cabinets full of photographs; our stock. A newspaper would ring up to ask, say, for a picture of a Chinese crowd rioting. The office boy and I looked first, of course, under China, but found nothing. “Try Japan” – no good. Finally we found a lot of Chinese in America’s China Town who looked a bit violent! The shops were in bad nick. We added a picture of an urban fire with plenty of flame and smoke and sent both up to the dark room where they were blended into a fairly convincing riot in China! Newspapers didn’t mind at all if we sent them fakes.

More interesting was advertising. “Send us something to mean ‘Whiteness’,” we enjoyed – but to be asked for a picture of a young couple with two children sitting in the middle of a field looking at a tubercular cow within the next half hour was asking a little much, even for us.
We did some fashion work and I had to dress the models. Either the frocks wouldn’t meet at the back and they had to be sewn in, or were much too large, which meant a row of clothes pegs up the back.

An article on Battersea Dogs Home with me, for economy’s sake, as the human interest, went to Titbits.