Bobby Orangeboom wrote:
Don't forget though IW, we can't tell a great deal from Black & White Pictures can we, White, Salmon, Sky Blue or whatever a Colour shade it may be...
Seriously though, i have been under the impression for a while now after someting that i can't particulary recall but have had it in my head that an all White Kit was used by WHUFC & TI at times as an Away Kit..
While that's true of a single photo or even photos, it isn't true of a train of evidence including photos and other sources.
Black and white photos are not totally useless they are just unreliable, it is possible to tell the difference between say a striped and plain kit, there may also be comparisons within the same photo like in the 1899 Thames Iron photo with two kits in the same photo...
Then if you know the colours but not the combination of them you can tell from B&W photos provided that the colours are of sufficiently different shades....
It should be borne in mind that different colours of similar darkness will appear the same in B&W photos, so if you don't know the colour then they're not much good in that respect, but where the colour is not in dispute then its a different matter....
It should be borne in mind that the photo may well not be the same as when it was taken due to deterioration over the years, it may lose mid shades to white, or it may darken so as lighter shades appear black, and it may do both of those things uniformly or patchily...
So the 1900 West Ham photo in which the kit appears white may genuinely have been white or maybe Castle blue shirts have faded through deterioration to white, there's no way of telling, the photo in itself is unreliable....
But when that photo is presented with another photo showing the same thing, a definite primary source of the same thing, and a highly probable primary source of the same thing, then it's part of a train of evidence that is much more reliable than it's individual components.