Every Friday I send out an email that features photos from the Rupert Leach Collection, snaps taken from the personal View-Master reels of View-Master’s Director of Photography in the 1940s and 50s. These never-before-published images show alternative shots of some commercial View-Master reels and some personal photos of Leach and his wife, Poppy.
This week’s reel takes us to Jungfraujoch in Switzerland.
The Jungfraujoch is known as the “top of Europe.” From the website:
Icy air sweeps over your face, snow crunches underfoot, and the panorama almost takes your breath away: on one side the view of the Swiss Mittelland towards the Vosges, on the other the Aletsch Glacier, lined with four thousand metre peaks. Standing on the Jungfraujoch 3,454 metres above sea level, you can feel it with your first step: this is a different world. It's one you have to experience.
I also watched this video to get a sense of the adventure and the journey, which I’m assuming has been updated since Rupert and Poppy took it in the 1940s, but lots of elements remain the same.
And Rupert and Poppy definitely did experience it.
Here are the snaps:
Those are the seven snaps from Leach’s personal reel. This week, I’d like to provide a little context to View-Master’s coverage of this place and of Switzerland overall.
View-Master in Switzerland
View-Master began issuing reels showing Switzerland in the late 1940s. According to the 1948 Dealerscope, they had recently added single reels cover Bern (reel 2003), Making Swiss Cheese (reel 2015), and Lugano and Locarno (reel 2019). They already had reels showcasing Zermatt (reel 2001), Zurich (reel 2005), Interlaken (reel 2009), Lucerne (reel 2014), St. Moritz (reel 2017), Geneva (reel 2020), and Basle (reel 2025).
I’m not clear when View-Master debuted reel 2056, The Jungfrau Railway, though, because, from what I can gather, it was only manufactured at the Belgium plant and doesn’t have a copyright date on it. However, based on numbering and inference of dates on other reels, it was probably released in the late 1950s.
All of that is to say: I can’t say who took each of the photos in the View-Master reels covering Switzerland in the 1940s but it was probably Rupert Leach.
Thanks for reading and thanks for your patience! These posts are pretty time consuming, so I appreciate everyone’s support.
Great to see these. Big fan of the Swiss reels (I have friends in a small village surrounded by mountains there). Of course, 2056 is one of the few Swiss ones I'm still looking for. And I love mountain railway scenes too! lol.