Today, with most people equipped with a perfectly reasonable camera in their back pocket, it is rare that an incident goes unrecorded.

But in the long gone days of film cameras the responsibility to record and capture everyday life largely fell to press photographers.

Last week, a new exhibition entitled ’This Is Summer’ opened at the House of Mannanan in Peel, looking at the work of one local photographic agency, Manx Press Pictures.

Few significant local occasions would have passed by in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s without being recorded for posterity by one of the company’s employees.

One such photographer who worked under owner Bill Peters was John Maddrell, who continues to take pictures for Isle of Man Newspapers publications today.

John worked with Manx Press Pictures after leaving school in 1963 up until the close of the business in 1980.

Many of his iconic images are featured in the exhibition, and also one of his cameras, a Rolleiflex twin lens 120, which was the staple workhorse camera of the 1960s. The camera shows the scars of a busy working life.

John explained that both he and the camera found themselves in many sticky situations while working.

’I was photographing a yacht race,’ said John. ’We were coming into Port St Mary harbour. I had one foot on the boat and one on the harbour steps and the boat moved. Down we both went. I had to dip the camera into paraffin and oil to save it.

’Another time, I was run over at Tholt-y-Will during the hill climb. It must have been about 1969, I think. The car came up through the hairpin, and the throttle stuck open.

’It went straight towards a group of us on the bank, and ended up going over my leg. The camera survived that, although the top took a knock and got a bit dented. I replaced it, and kept the damaged top as a souvenir. That’s why it still has the press pass label attached to it. The camera still works today, despite everything its been through.’

As is John himself, who at least gave himself a rare night off to attend the opening.

The images featured in the exhibition offer a snapshot of a sun-kissed Isle of Man during the tourist heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, which would have graced the pages of the newspapers of the time, the Isle of Man Times, Isle of Man Examiner, Mona’s Herald, Manx Star and the Saturday sports paper Green Final.

Former editors Bill Dale and Valerie Cottle officially opened the exhibition with a talk on the history of the Manx press.

The exhibition runs until September.