The Bombardier Hart Moment

The Bombardier Hart Moment

I love quotes, but you’ll have to look the relevant one up: it’s not suitable for a nice website like Ephotozine. It comes, if I remember rightly, from Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall by Spike Milligan. The book relates part of the story of Milligan’s time in the Army during World War Two, and comes at a point when Milligan and a number of other new recruits have failed to put up a large tent. Further, one of their number is trapped under yards of Army canvas when the Sergeant Major arrives and asks what’s going on here. Bombardier Hart explained. I paraphrase: ‘Sergeant, we have utterly failed in our endeavours, and have indeed made things worse than if we had stood still. There is no excuse for our pathetic performance. We wish we had never been born.’ But he said it in four words. Three of them were we, it, and up.

It’s that moment when you realise that it’s all gone pear-shaped. Down the tubes. Up the creek, sans paddle. And it’s all your own fault.

I’ve had a few of those with cameras and developing tanks. And even with Compact Flash cards. Usually, I have had no chance to share the blame, but just occasionally, others have contributed.



When I was a teenager, along with the Zenith, Zorki and Fed cameras that Technical and Optical Equipment Limited imported came some more exotic and less-known things. For instance, there was a developing tank that took a whole roll of Double-8 ciné film, around twenty-five feet. There was also a little round device that you pushed the dried film through, so that it was divided precisely in two.
(This was necessary because Double-8 cameras used film 16mm wide, with twice the number of perforations that 16mm film had. The film gate in the camera was offset to one side, and you ran the film through the camera, then swapped over the two spools just like that hospital scene in the film of Catch 22 with the drip and drain bags. Consequently, you ended up with fifty feet of film, with fogging in the middle as well as at both ends…)

And a further miracle was that TOE imported film and chemicals to go with the tank. Technopan was black-and-white, while the colour emulsion was called Technocolor (one letter different from the popular movie process, you note). And here’s where it went a tiny bit wrong, because the instructions for mixing the chemicals were missing, and the bags were unlabelled. Worse, there wasn’t a single bag to each processing bath, but most involved two or three. Weirdly, there were instructions for making up the necessary processing baths from raw chemicals.



I was ingenious, though, and by weighing the bags of chemicals, I worked out which bags must correspond to which bath, making the natural assumption – which, 50 years on, I realise was not necessarily valid – that the manufacturer would supply precisely the same chemicals as in the ‘make up your own’ formula. ‘Twas not so.

Colour positive processing was a long business back then: not the two baths and half an hour of E-6, but around 90 minutes and six or seven baths. So my own Bombardier Hart moment was delayed quite a long time. Only when I opened the tank did I find that the way I’d mixed the chemicals had led to a magenta-tinged negative mess…

But eventually I reached that moment. I had utterly failed in my endeavours, and had indeed made things worse than if I had stood still. There was no excuse for my pathetic performance. I wished I had never been born.