My parents, John and Maureen Roche, were married on October 9th, 1971, in Dundrum church. My dad was a photographer in the Garda Technical Bureau in Phoenix Park, and he had a friend of his, Mick Flanagan, be the official photographer for the day.
When all the photos at the church were taken, and the cutting of the cake photos also, everyone enjoyed the reception afterwards at the Clarence Hotel, including the photographer Mick, who had done his job for the day.
Unfortunately, while everyone was inside dancing and laughing, Mick’s camera, with all the pictures still undeveloped, was stolen from his car outside the hotel.
It was disappointing but there were other photographer friends of my dad’s there with cameras (not so normal in the early 1970s) and so an album of photos was eventually cobbled together after the wedding.
In the mid 1980s the son of a distant relation was helping build a wall in our back garden as my brother and I ran about the place.
Over the course of the day’s work he mentioned to my dad that his mother had seen a photo of my parents’ wedding day stuck in a window of a chemist in Ballyfermot. Back then, developed pictures that were not collected from the chemist were sometimes stuck in the window to advertise the service.
We figured that someone, perhaps the thief, who may not have been able to open the back of a professional camera, might have handed over the whole thing to a chemist to remove the film.
Sure enough, all the photos and negatives from my mother and father’s happy day were found in the chemist, presumably left in to the shop more than 10 years before. And so, more than a decade later, their official wedding photograph album was finally put together.
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