The Ensign Ful-Vue. An all metal British Box Camera from the immediate post war period 1945-1954.

I was not really intending to write a post about the Ensign Ful-Vue, however just by chance I found my example today. To be fair, I did not realise I still had it, but rummaging about looking for another camera totally I came across it, sat in a box grinning up at me, along with my Praktica B200 I bought when I was 21!

So, if time allows I will do a post on both cameras before my Wix subscription runs out and the blog comes to an end.

The Ensign Ful-Vue was my first camera, it was a gift from a friend of my Dads, they were both in the Skipton Camera Club at the time. I was about 8 or 9. I suppose it must have been about 20 or more years old when I got it, but it looked pretty good to me at the time, and it worked. My fist film was taken of the trains parked up in the then quite extensive sidings at Skipton station. I suppose it should be surprising, but all the images on that 120 Roll film came out! Yes some were a little fuzzy and some slightly under exposed, but they all made it. I was hooked.

So lets have a bit of a look at the Ensign Ful-Vue. I've blown the dust off it and it looks quite smart! It is rather a strange looking thing, but it is still working more or less, 80 or so years after it rolled out of the Ensign Works in Fulbourne Road Walthamstow in London, so this camera proved to be a simple but rugged and long lasting design. The combination of the steel body pressings, robust black crystalline paint and tough case have all contributed to the camera surviving in relatively large numbers. I think of it as the Land-Rover of the camera world, British, a bit ugly but simple, tough and like the Land-Rover, surviving in large numbers compared to other basic cameras of the time.

To prove a point, there are 68 examples of this type of Ful-Vue currently on British eBay at the time of writing. Not bad for a cheap box type camera made between about 1945-1954! When you read the descriptions most of them are still claimed to be working. The shutter on my example still works, but every now and then it fails to open, so I might have to have a look and clean things up a little.

It looks like just three screws hold the shutter to the camera and that it comes off in one unit, it can't be that complicated can it?

To load the camera you turn a round knob marked lock and unlock in the direction of the unlock arrow and the camera comes apart into two halves. Once loaded you push the two halves together and lock them with the same knob in turned in the opposite direction. All pretty simple stuff.

The red window is at the back of the camera. Early versions like my example were un covered, but later ones had a different pressing which had a cover operated by a little screw.

There were coloured versions in red, blue and a sort of grey colour as well as the more common black, various cases including a waterproof clear case to show off your coloured version in time for the Queens Coronation in June 1953 !

I really like this camera, but that has more to do with it being my first ever camera more than anything else I suppose. Except for its best feature, the massive bright viewfinder, which to me as a kid was everything. You could see exactly what you were taking, in a big bright image, sat there on top of your camera. No squinting, no blurred fuzzy image, no guessing, to a kid of 8 or 9 sat on Skipton Station taking pictures of trains, this was all you needed and it worked.

By the time production of the Ensign Ful-Vue ended, the company name has changed from Houghton Butcher Manufacturing Company Ltd, to Barnet Ensign Ltd. The company was well into it's last decade of existence. I think it made its best cameras ever in the 1950's, its range of folding cameras was first class and the better models with their rangefinders and very high quality Ross lenses were more than a match for the Ikontas and Super Ikontas coming out of Germany, but the British public were not buying enough of them! Despite two world wars and all that pointless death and destruction, which you would think would put British people off ever buying anything German ever again, we still had this notion, completely wrong in my view, that German cameras were the best!

That myth was the undoing of Ensign cameras, by 1961, the year I was born, it was all over and the British Empires largest camera manufacturing facility was no more.

Maybe it was not helped by them not having a 35mm camera to go forward with, and dropping the Multex 127 camera was with hindsight a big mistake, but to fold suddenly like a pack of cards must have, or should have, shocked the British public and its politicians.

But no, it just seemed to have faded away, just like its only real home based rival, Coronet was to do 6 years later.

Ironic, it was the 1960's, more people than ever could afford to buy a camera, but our own camera industry was going to the wall at the same time as our Motorcycle industry was also collapsing. The once proud British Empire and its manufacturing industry was starting its slow decline.

Well that is it I'm afraid, time has rum out on my little blog. I suppose it is fitting that my first cameras was my last post.

I hope you enjoyed some of the ninety odd posts I managed to put out, I enjoyed doing them. But paying for the website for just a handful of readers per post just can't be justified.

All the best,

Phil