Local Martinborough resident, Tim Maling, has recently published a book “Glimpses of Persia”. He recounts to me how the source of the material for the book was created ninety years ago.
In 1935, Tim’s father, Peter Bromley (Sam) Maling, a 23-year-old geologist, joined a geological exploration and survey of an area in southern Iran (previously Persia) that was known to be rich in oil deposits. Britain already held an oil prospecting concession with the Iranian government but the area that it covered was about to be reduced by half. Therefore, a survey was critical to locate the most promising oil-bearing regions. As well as carrying out his geological mapping, Sam also kept a diary and took photos of what he observed of the people and the land. He shot hundreds of extraordinary photographs with his Voightlander bellows camera and developed them in the field as negatives. Tim remembers that when he was a boy there were prints of some of them, framed and hanging on the walls of his house. His father would often talk about his experiences in Persia, referring to the photos. In 1990, twenty of the prints were displayed in an exhibition held at a gallery. Tim can clearly recall the little 35 mm negatives that his father kept carefully stored in wooden boxes. Following Sam’s death in 2012, these were retained by the family. In 2017 Tim was looking through them and thought that, as they were such an amazing record of an important time and place, they should be seen by the public.
It was John Slater of Photo Workshop in Martinborough who made this possible. He showed Tim how to use his scanner to convert the negatives to positives and taught him how to use Photoshop to clean up the images. Tim had never done anything like this in his life and was amazed at what he could do to bring these photos back to life. Over many years 120 images were painstakingly completed. Seventy of them appear in the book, matched to the text taken from Sam’s diary. I find the book very moving in the way it so vividly captures the reality of life in that remote part of southern Persia at the time.
Tim tells me that he mainly did it to provide a record of his father’s intrepid adventures for his grandchildren. But he also would like to open it up to the locals in Martinborough. Tim will be presenting his book at a launch being held at Martinborough Books & Post at 5.00 pm on Saturday 29 November.
