We’re all used to seeing pictures of the past in stark black and white but now for the first time there’s a chance to see how the past really looked. Our new series takes applies a colourisation process to some familiar scenes in towns in Wales and the borders and transforms them in to glorious colour.

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SOMETIMES it’s fun to go on a march, bang a drum, twirl a baton, shake some pom poms, fly a flag, chant some nonsense, and just lose your mind to the illogical and hysterical nature of mob rule. Although it’s tempting to think the people in this picture are marching because, like so much of the modern world, they want to be American, look closely and the photo tells a different story. The year is 1990, the setting is Cinderford and the protestors are marching at the government’s handling of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or mad cow’s disease as we liked to call it back then. You can bet your bottom dollar that there weren’t any burger fans making a killing that day! (Tindle News )
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BEFORE the Peaky Blinders made a Brummie accent acceptable to the masses, there was an equally fierce and feared gang in Abergavenny named the Boot, Braces, and Bat Boys, or the Beebies for short. As a spiritual predecessor of the football casual firms of the 1980s, image was everything to the Beebies. Here they are in 1864 all tooled up and looking sharp. As you can see from the angle of their hats and the cut of their cloth they didn’t take no messing. Their look is said to be the inspiration for the droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ Yet that could be just an urban myth. What we do now is the boys in the pic also played for Abergavenny Cricket Club. (Abergavenny Cricket Club )
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BEFORE AI singularity and the robot apocalypse was a thing, the people in the good town of Monmouth had to deal with the threat posed by another artificial life-form. Yet in this case it wasn’t a hive mind of zeroes and ones that were the problem it was an army of puppets who were causing all the trouble. Their leader was an immaculately turned-out lady puppet in heels named Dorothea. As pretty as she was vicious, Dorothea and her gang of murderous marionettes terrorised the people of Monmouth, or the ‘Mon Mons’ as the puppets cruelly called them, for many a moon. Her reign of terror finally came to an end in the 1950s when the man who created her, the famous Monmouth photographer and puppeteer W.A. Call, finally unmade her. Here they both are pictured in happier times. (Monmouth Museum )