A remarkable photo taken at Fair Meadow on 27th June 1929 during Civic Week ….. a scene that would undoubtedly result in civil unrest today !
The decorated float was entered in the carnival’s “comic class” by the city’s firemen and even won an award during later judging.
In the late 1800s, the fictitious city of Darktown was the basis for a series of prints produced by American printers Currier & Ives that depicted a racist caricature based society and included a particular obsession with the local fire fighting capability.
In the early 1900s, these popular prints were mass produced by printers across Europe including London.
Historians now position these prints as “valuable mirrors of the national taste, weather vanes of popular opinion and reflectors of American attitudes of the latter half of the nineteenth century”.
