IF there was anything important happening in Wensleydale during the Fifties you could be sure that Frank Knowles would be there, armed with his camera to catch the scene for posterity.

But the life of a Press photographer was far different to what it is now. He had to operate without a mobile phone and with a camera that used glass plates as negatives.

"When you carried a box of those around with you, you knew about it," Mr Knowles, 74, commented. And that was in addition to the heavy power pack required for the flash bulbs.

Having just retired as Leyburn's best-known ironmonger, he has time now to reflect on the job which brought him to the town in the early Fifties.

After leaving school in Harrogate, he found work with the Ministry of Aircraft Production's photographic laboratories there. It was that experience which helped him get a job at Ackrills as a photo printer. Within five years he became the staff photographer covering Bedale and Wensleydale.

"It was the life of Riley. There are not many jobs where you are your own boss and can do exactly what you want when you want," he said.

His photographs ranged from Wilfrid Pickles in the stocks at Aysgarth just before recording one of his famous Have a Go radio programmes to haymaking by hand in Coverdale.

Action photographs were the hardest to do because, after each shot, he had to change the glass slide.

"When taking pictures, you only had one chance to get an action shot. I could change a glass slide in 30 seconds. You had to keep careful track of which ones were unused and which ones were used. Otherwise you could spoil the ones you had already taken."

Timing was the essence such as when he was up on Wether Fell near Hawes in 1957 to watch the bomb disposal unit from Portsmouth detonate a 100lbs bomb which had lain there since 1941. It took the unit five weeks to reach the bomb but Mr Knowles had only minutes to photograph the 200ft-high plume of debris when it exploded.

It was even harder to estimate the right moment to take a photograph when one of the largest prepared explosions in England took place at Redmire Quarry in 1952. His photograph shows the rock face bulging outwards due to the impact of 3,750lbs of explosive when it was detonated inside a tunnel.

He was dependent upon local contacts and the sound of the fire station siren or an ambulance bell to catch other events.

"I had to follow a lot of ambulances to get one good story," Mr Knowles said. It was an ambulance which led him to him being the first pressman to reach the Blea Moor tunnel near Ribblehead station in April 1952 after a Glasgow to London express had crashed.

He took some moving photographs not only of the crash, complete with discarded pram, but also of a mother with her baby waiting with other injured passengers for transport.

He often beat the firemen to fires for his Press van was faster than their fire engine.

"The fire engines were not much better than Green Goddesses. When I heard the siren, I went to the fire station to find out what sort of fire it was."

If the retained firemen, led by Bill Ward and his brother Vincent, were out of town they often could not hear the siren. One day, only two answered the call, a fireman and Mr Knowles. So they loaded two extinguishers into the Press van and raced to a house in Maythorne. There they found a sofa was smouldering so they pulled it outside and doused it. That was one fire he did not photograph.

Nor was he the photographer at another important event - his own marriage. He married Betty Wray in 1953 and in 1960 joined the Wray family ironmongery business in Leyburn. Even when this was sold, Mr Knowles continued as the manager until his retirement.