Documenting old photographs must be a tedious and hard job, we cannot always reach to those implied on it to ask for the information, right? Sources should also not be quite numerous and I don’t even want to think on the methodological steps to be followed for it. So, it is quite natural to get a few details a bit off, from time to time, we are all humans and photographs at the beginning of the 20th century were far from clear.
The issue might be a tad different when you see those not-so-right-details on a site that is supposed to, not only have the knowledge and the qualified personnel for the job, but also are seemed as a source of information and has some prestige, that means, as an institution, a museum should have a well documented information on each item.
This comes as I have just come across for a second time to a Imperial War Museum’s photograph that is, indeed, not well described on their website (my only hope is that I have come across the only two :___). But sometimes, this is frustrating for someone learning because there are already too many misleading photo’s footnotes everywhere, and it was totally unexpected.
This might come as a “oh, you’ve just read a couple of book on the topic and think so much of yourself” rant, but it just happened that for one of them, you only need to put dates together to know that it looks more likely they have added some big names than actually investigated who is on the photograph or where it was taken.
This is rant, but mostly a confirmation that consulting only one source of information is no good, you always need to contrast the info and never take something for granted.
Let’s take a close look at it.
This is the photograph in question (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205039586)
And here the description on the site (from the same link above):
I am not even going to start on the point that the setting is Château Marckebeke where JG 1 stationed from 23rd June 1917, alas, I shouldn’t, I am not an expert. It is only that there is another lovely photo with the same background on http://www.frontflieger.de/2-j11.html whose description is more plausible and where the people on it have been more clearly identified.
Nor I am getting into the fact that four pilots are marked as unknown, c’mon IWM, you are no fun, let’s play Who-is-Who, you have not even tried, like with the others.
Jokes aside, actually, what really puts you off on that description are two names, one is “Ernst Udet” and the other is “Friedrich Noltenius”.
Ernst Udet joins JG 1, actually is recruited to Jasta 11, on 15th March 1918; and so happened with Friedrich Noltenius who started his pilot’s training on December 1917. By that time, we can actually pretty much confirm that Kurt Wolff (September 1917), Werner Voss (September 1917) and Karl Emil Schäfer (June 1917) have been long dead.
It must even be safed to confim that the only person correctly identified on the photograph is Manfred von Richthofen, really. Extra point because in both sites it is named as a Jasta 11 image, still to be confirmed.
As I am already ranting, let’s go with the second one that is not correctly described.
This one, is a bit more complex as it is indeed about the background.
When I read the description for the first time, I wondered how they managed to move the propeller to the hospital’s yard and who gave permission for that, even if they were all allowed to visit Richthofen. But once again, this is not the military hospital where Richthofen stayed during a couple of weeks after been shot in the head, but, the infamous Château Marckebeke’s entrance stairs where they did love to be photographed.
By the way, this photograph here (later turned into a postcard) is taken just on the side of the same stairs (might it be the same propeller? Who knows):
Actually, there are indeed, a lot of photos taken on those stairs. By the way the first one is not on these stairs, but it is supposed to be on the back side of the castle.
These two too (adding them only because, Moritz is on them, the poor thing was forbidden to get inside after destroying too many billard balls from the Officer’s Mess <3):
Just as a curiosity, I have seem this one below described as Richthofen and Moritz at Schweidnitz, at his home’s entrace, no, nop, as far as it can be found Moritz never got to his master’s home, but let me know otherwise.
Fortunately, the best advice learnt here is not to trust a source before you have compared it with at least another two.
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