Photo Gallery
Like many other villages in this part of Norfolk we are indebted to local photographer Tom Nokes from Norwich who toured south from his home in Chester Street on his trust bicycle taking pictures of people and events in the early 1900s. He took many photographs in Swardeston and produced the "Towler Series" of postcards for Billy Towler, the Swardeston postmaster, to sell in the village post office. Many of the pictures used on this website carry the distinctive Nokes signature.
To make it more manageable the Photo Gallery is subdivided into photographs taken Around The Common, School Photographs, Who's Who and People from WW1.
Around The Common is a series of views moving in a roughly clockwise direction around "High Common" where all the viewpoints can be identified within a few metres although several depicted buildings are no longer standing.
The School Photographs page contains a series of pictures of the pupils and staff at the village school. Apart from the more recent pictures the majority of the people have not been identified.
The Who's Who? page contains photographs of various groups of people taken in the village where only a few, if any, persons have been identified.
The People from WW1 page contains photographs of demobilised soldiers with their nurses and carers. Most of these photographers were taken at Swardeston but there is no indication as to wheter or not the soldiers are local.
If you are able to shed any light on names and/or dates with regard to any of our photographs please make use of our Contact page.
Don Your Detective's Hat!
The pictures below present ongoing puzzles. If you can help solve the mystery please use our Contact page.
Blood Wharton
This wonderful picture, taken by Tom Nokes, is of local character "Blood" Wharton. He was obviously not baptised as Blood but, despite there still being residents in the village who knew him, we can find nobody who knows his proper name.
We assume he gained the name (and the sheep's head) from his employment in the abattoir at The Wood which was them in Mulbarton. In the early 1900s when this picture was taken there were several branches of the Wharton family in Swardeston and the surrounding villages and several possible candidates for his true identity.
Swardeston Cricket Team
This photograph of the village cricket team was, we are told, taken at Keswick Park when the team played there before the common was levelled and the club moved to Swardeston. The team are posed in front of their changing room which was apparently a redundant chicken shed.
Several of the players and certainly the umpire will be immediately recognisable and there are probably some former cricketers around who can identify everybody including the two gentlemen seated on the bench.
Alfred P King. Butcher
In the 1930s A P King, then living at Hall Farm in Gowthorpe Lane, had a butcher's shop built next to the, then, post office beside the turnpike. Alfred, one of the two butchers standing in the shop doorway, also features in our WW1 survivor profiles but who are the other three members of his staff?
Swardeston Dog Bowls Team
A number of people in the village have combined their knowledge, either first-hand or from family photographs, to identify all the players in this bowls team picture from 1927.
Virtually every "family" from Swardeston history is represented here even down to the two lads sitting in the foreground whose family resemblance has them marked down as members of the Fairman and Bobbin families. Can you shed light on exactly who they are?