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Photos show 'pivotal moment in history of Europe'

Catherine Nicoll
BBC News, Isle of Man
LEONARD MCCOMBE People laughing and smiling while celebrating VE Day in a London Street that has been bombed. There is a bonfire in the street and there is Union Jack bunting above their heads and a child with his face turned to the camera is waving a flag on a pole.LEONARD MCCOMBE
Leonard McCombe captured images of VE Day on a bombed-out street in London

Images captured during the final months of World War Two in Europe have gone on display on the Isle of Man for the first time.

The exhibition of Manx-born photographer Leonard McCombe's work was put together to coincide with the 80th anniversary of VE Day.

The photographs on display at the House of Manannan in Peel show glimpses of some of the key events in Normany, Berlin and London in the months around the end of the conflict in Europe.

Social history curator for Manx National Heritage Matthew Richardson said the images provided a "fantastic documentary record of this pivotal moment in the history of Europe".

LEONARD MCCOMBE A board with a picture of McCombe holding up his camera with the words Through the Lens of War above it, with a view through to the exhibition on the right.LEONARD MCCOMBE
The exhibition features photographs taken in between 1944 and 1945

Born in 1923, McCombe spent his childhood in Port Erin in the south of the island and took up photography as an early age.

He was commissioned to capture the alien internees held in the island's only all-female internment camp at Rushen following the outbreak of war, and went on to travel through Europe working as a photojournalist.

Following the end of the war he moved to the United States, where he spent many years continuing to work as a photographer for Life Magazine.

He left the profession to focus on the family farm after the publication closed.

LEONARD MCCOMBE Train carriages at a railway station filled with people inside on sitting on top, with many others on the platform in front of it.LEONARD MCCOMBE
The exhibition is on display until 5 October at the House of Manannan
LEONARD MCCOMBE There framed photos on a wall featuring children holding a doll, a woman holding a small dog, and a man and a woman standing against a wall next to a child.LEONARD MCCOMBE
McCombe documented life in Europe after the war ended
Clark McColme, who has a grey hair and beard and it wearing a mustard jumper and a tweed jacket, and his wife Beverly, who has dark hair and is wearing a dark blue formal jacket, standing in front of a black and white image in the exhibition.
Clark and Beverly McCombe worked with Manx National Heritage on the project

The display, which is running in parallel to an exhibition at Heidelberg University, has been put together with McCombe's family, and coincides with a stamp issue featuring five decades of his photography.

Clark McCombe said seeing the his father's wartime work on display "gives me goosebumps, literally".

"There's this chaos of war and he's there with a camera, and he's 21 years old. You start to put all that together and you realise, while he's daddy, I should have known he was much more than I thought he was at 12 or especially 15 or 16 years old.

"I can't imagine what he went through, what that generation went through," he added.

LEONARD MCCOMBE A row of photographs in black frames hanging on a grey gallery wall, The one at the front features a fair-haired child with plaits smiling. LEONARD MCCOMBE
LEONARD MCCOMBE There framed photos on a wall with the largest featuring British and Russian soldiers in conversation.LEONARD MCCOMBE

Mr Richardson said McCombe had been "in the right place at the right time" during the final months of the conflict.

"He was on the Normandy battlefields, he was in Paris as the city was liberated, and he was in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of VE Day, and he just had such an eye for capturing an image," he said.

Mr Richardson added: "This is an exhibition that really brings it home to people what the real consequences of the fighting in Europe were.

"By the time the dust settled in 1945 several European capitals had been reduced almost to rubble, and this exhibition shows in human terms what that means, what the consequences were for those people who'd lost their homes, lost everything."

The exhibition will be on display until 05 October.

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