The group photographed outside Findern House in about 1939 are members of the Kirkland and Knight families. They lived next door to each other in the row of three-storey properties. The Kirklands ran the Artists' Corner Café and provided bed and breakfast accommodation, with apartments also to let. On the house wall to the right of the door is a sign for a "Lavatory". There were no public conveniences in this part of the Dale so, for a small fee, they would allow members of the public to use their facilities.

Frederick W Kirkland, a master plumber and painter by trade, is on the left^[1]. During the Second World War he became an APR warden^[2]. His wife Lilian May (nee Knight) is standing next to him and Sarah Jane Knight, May's mother, is framed by the doorway. William Reginald Kirkland, Fred and May's teenage son (born December 1926), is on the right. Fred Kirkland was born with the surname Richards^[3], and was still using the name when he married May at Holy Trinity in 1922 but afterwards he assumed the name Kirkland.

By this time (1939) Sarah Jane Knight and her husband William James were living in the house on the right - at Denstone, Artists Corner^[1]. You can just see the front door of their home. May was their eldest daughter^[4]. The Knights had moved to Matlock Bath about 1904/05 and lived in one of the cottages below Orchard Road^[5] but later moved to Devonshire Terrace on Brunswood Road^[6]. William James Knight was a local postman^[5], regularly driving the mail cart to Lea and Holloway, but enlisted into the Bedfordshires in WW1^[6], a regiment he had served with before^[7]. So Sarah Jane had to cope alone with her own grief and the distress of her children when the eldest of the couple's seven children, William Ernest, died in the First World War^[8]. The Knights kept a boarding house on North Parade post war before moving to Artists' Corner^[9]. William James had retired in 1933^[7], passing away in 1954. Sarah Jane died the following year, aged 83^[10]. May was 94 years old when she died in 1994.

The Wilson family lived to the right of the Knights^[1], in the shop with the flat roof (not shown here), and their daughter Ivy was a similar age to William Reginald Kirkland so would have known him well. She provides an insight into what life was like for children living in the Dale in the 1930s. "I lived on Artists' Corner and saw many artists painting or sketching. My favourite roaming place was Masson up past St John's Church up to the Heights of Abraham. I spent most of my childhood up there"^[11].

On the left, where the little boy has paused in the doorway, was Mr. Carding's General Shop. John Thomas Carding was employed as a road labourer so his wife Emma would have run the business, something she had then been doing for over thirty years^[12]. The Cardings seem to have traded in things for tourists including postcards, ices and bottles of drink (the crates are on the far left of the picture) as well as groceries. They also advertised Lyons Tea and would have served this on trays that people would carry onto the grassy area next to the river Derwent. In 1939 Emma Carding was being helped by her daughter Blanche, who had been tragically widowed just two weeks after her marriage some seven years before^[13].

Mr Knight attended funeral of fellow postman in 1912 - Matlock Bath & Scarthin Newspaper Cuttings, 1912 ("the late W. Hardy").