The box did not appear to be a treasure chest. In fact, it appeared to be quite ordinary. Its contents, however, were anything but.

It was an ordinary box, an unremarkable box, scruffy, worn and unwanted. Nothing about its outward appearance suggested value or importance. It appeared to be little more than junk. Indeed, the box was on sale for next to nothing at a car boot sale. But inside it was a trove of historical artifacts, waiting to be discovered…

Car boot sales are a British institution. They draw crowds of professional and amateur traders, bargain-hunters, floggers and peddlers, all hoping to dispense of unwanted personal items – or pick up a bargain. Not unlike sprawling American yard sales, car boot sales are essentially junk sales conducted from the boots (trunks) of cars.

Which is not to say that everything on offer at a “car boot” is junk. In fact, it is not unusual to stumble on worthy items at such events. Or more rarely, hidden treasure. Indeed, the search for car boot bargains is the basis for reality TV programs such as Bargain Hunt and Star Boot Sale. Furthermore, one shopper did find hidden treasure inside an unremarkable box at a car boot sale in August 2018.

Image: Scott Pack/Triangle News via Daily Mail Online / BookBrunch

The lucky shopper was Greg Pack, a 70-year-old retired graphics artist from Canvey Island – a reclaimed island in the River Thames estuary in Essex in the United Kingdom. His son, Scott Pack, is a 47-year-old writer and publishing professional. Scott subsequently publicized his father’s good fortune on social media, drawing the attention of numerous international news organizations.

On August 15, 2018, Greg had attended Marks Tey car boot sale in the town of Chelmsford in Essex. One of his hobbies is repairing antique clocks and he was searching the sale for potential acquisitions. It was then he spotted the unremarkable old box. And it piqued his interest. Indeed, there was more to the box than its plain appearances.

In fact, according to Scott, the closed box was begging to be opened. “My dad was at a boot sale recently and saw this battered old box,” he wrote on a Twitter thread on August 20. “He is a fan of boxes, and boxes are made to be opened, so he did what most of us would do and peeked inside.”

As a one-time graphics artist, Greg immediately recognized its contents. In fact, the box contained an array of glass plate photographic negatives in “various states of disrepair,” according to Scott. And they were cheap.

“The seller wanted £5 ($6.44) for them, but you always have to pay less than is being asked,” Greg told the Press Association. “So I got them for £4 ($5.15), silly money.”

Glass plates were the main photographic medium before the invention of cellulose film in 1903. There were two formats: so-called “collodion wet plates” and “gelatin dry plates.” However, they both worked in the same way. In short, their surfaces were coated with a light-sensitive emulsion of silver salts (much like plastic film), which captured images.

Image: Niels Bohr Institute via The History Blog

Glass plates may seem somewhat primitive compared to 21st century digital cameras, but they are in fact capable of highly detailed shots – so much so that astronomers were still using them in the 1990s. However, as Pack himself pointed out, glass negatives can have degradation issues. “The problem with glass negatives is that they fade,” he told the British TV channel ITV in August 2018.

Indeed, it was not until Pack “processed” the plates digitally that he was able to discern either their condition or subject matter. “I held the glass negatives up to the sky and took a photo with my iPhone,” he told the newspaper Metro. “I sent the results to my laptop and opened them in Photoshop, before turning them into a positive image.”

It was then that Pack realized the plates were a collection of cherished family photos. Apparently on vacation by the seaside, the family included several young girls in formal dresses; what may have been several siblings or cousins posing for a group shot; and a man and a girl (probably father and daughter) horsing around with a piggyback ride, among several others.

Pack was evidently astonished by the find. “When I saw the images I was amazed at the quality,” he told the newspaper The Irish News. “…and the fact that they were over 100 years old is quite moving. To think that I was the first person to see them for around 100 years, awesome.”

Speaking to the newspaper i, he explained that the people depicted in the photos would probably never be identified. “The photos seem to show a whole family,” he said. “The old dear in the big family shot looks very old. I don’t know where they are. Maybe it’s a holiday… but of course I don’t know. I think the chances of tracking them down is virtually impossible.”

Still, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t worth a try – or at least that’s what Scott appeared to think. Hoping for some insights, he shared the images on Twitter. They went viral instantly, prompting a deluge of theories from online sleuths. “It’s gone absolutely mad – Scott tells me there are now over 16 million hits on his posts,” Greg told Metro. “I am lost for words.”

Adding to the intrigue, Scott also shared a photo of a list of names that they found pasted inside the lid of the box. “All in English,” he explained in a Twitter post, “but with some French place names mentioned, we think… We would love to find out more about them. Or even just date them.”

Responding to the call, some Twitter users speculated about the names. “Perhaps the spelling may have been Henri Mabille,” wrote one user called De Luipaard. “You can find a writer and a composer with that name. It would be hard to explain how either one of those would end up in English family pictures.”

“There’s a Tillie Gardiner in the 1940 US census,” wrote Jules Lewis. “Maybe an American family traveling through Europe between the wars?”

Other commented on the supposed French place names. “‘Henri Mabile’ is perhaps a square in Rennes, France, which is just outside Normandy,” wrote Tony Aiello.

“Honfleur is in the Calvados region of Normandy,” wrote Adrian Luty. “The family must have traveled across La Manche to holiday there. Honfleur is especially known for its old, beautiful port, characterized by houses with slate-covered frontages & painted many times by painters including Claude Monet…”

Indeed, most of the French names appear to be places in Normandy. But of course, there is a good chance they have nothing to do with the photos at all. Meanwhile, the soldier in one of the pictures appears to be dressed in a uniform dating to about 1900. And many of the dresses appear to be Edwardian too. So as far as dates go, the plates were likely to be more than a hundred years old, perhaps made shortly before World War I.

On August 22, Scott offered an interesting update. In one of the images, there appears to be a display board of photos inside a building. This, along with the fact that the building has large windows and is too small to be lived in, led Scott to deduce that the building was in fact a photography studio. “And it does sort of make sense,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, Greg is awed by the public response to the images. “Those seconds of exposure to the camera lens 100 years ago [are] now visible again and it seems to have captured the imagination of 20 million people,” he wrote in a letter of gratitude shared by Scott on Twitter. “Unbelievable… Thank you to my son, Scott, and Twitter followers for making all this possible…”